Valve News Archives

Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais just provided an update during XDC2020 on the Gamescope compositor work as an evolution of Valve's prior "steamcompmgr" X11 window manager used by SteamOS.

After a small dip in July, how did the Steam on Linux gaming marketshare end out for August prior to many gamers returning to school and others still being isolated at home? A small uptick but still under the 1% threshold.

While some platforms like Netmarketshare have reported increases month-over-month for Linux desktop usage, that doesn't appear to be translating similarly to the Linux gaming market-share, or at least not at the rate Steam is growing on Windows and macOS. Valve has just published their July 2020 numbers that are part of the Steam Survey.

Valve appears to have hired yet another open-source graphics driver developer and will initially be working on the Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver.

Valve and CodeWeavers have rolled out a release candidate of Proton 5.0-10 as the newest update to their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

With the start of a new month comes the latest numbers out of Valve for the rough Linux gaming market percentage from the Steam Survey.

Last year Valve in cooperation with consulting firm Collabora published their work on extending the futex system call for more optimal thread pool synchronization with a means of waiting on any of several futexes. This kernel-level work paired with patched user-space for Wine/Proton allows better matching behavior on Windows. It's been months since hearing anything on Valve's futex effort while today a futex2 system call was published for discussion.

Following last week's big Proton 5.0-8 release, Valve and CodeWeavers have just released Proton 5.0-9 as a quick bug fix release.

Valve and CodeWeavers have been preparing a new release of the Proton 5.0 series for powering Steam Play with running modern Windows games on Linux.

Valve developers have been working on Vulkan shader pre-caching with their latest Steam client betas to help in allowing Vulkan/SPIR-V shaders to compile ahead of time, letting them be pre-cached on disk to allow for quicker game load times and any stuttering for games that otherwise would be compiling the shaders on-demand during gameplay, especially under Steam Play.

On launch-day Valve had Half-Life: Alyx running on Linux via Steam Play while with the VR game's latest update is now a Linux-native build and Vulkan rendering support.

Valve has published their Steam Survey results for April, which is the first full month where the US and still much of the world has been in lockdown over the coronavirus, and thus interesting to see how it has impacted the gamer metrics.

Following the Proton 5.0-7 release candidate from a few days ago, this critical part of Valve's Steam Play is now available for weekend gamers.

Valve along with their comrades at CodeWeavers are preparing Proton 5.0-7 as the newest version of their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

Valve has released a new beta version of Steam Audio, their featureful spatial audio solution for game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. This new release brings expanded Android support and a number of new audio features.

Following the Proton 5.0-6 release candidate from earlier this month that brought out-of-the-box support for DOOM Eternal under Linux, Valve today promoted Proton 5.0-6 to being officially available.

With Steam and other online gaming platforms seeing record usage in recent weeks as a result of home isolation around the world as a result of the coronavirus, one of the matters of curiosity has been how this will impact the Linux gaming percentage.

Valve is finishing up work on Proton 5.0-6 as the next version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play. With Proton 5.0-6 are some promising improvements.

Valve today released their Half-Life: Alyx virtual reality first-person shooter game and built atop their Source 2 engine.

As another update to their Wine-based Proton 5.0 series for powering Steam Play, Valve has been readying their next update for enhancing the experience of running Windows games on Linux under Steam.

Proton 5.0-4 is out as Valve's Wine-based layer for running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play.

Valve has finally fixed an annoying bit about logging into the Steam client from the Linux desktop in recent months.

After hitting 0.9% in January for the Steam on Linux marketshare that was a high for at least the past year, the Linux gaming percentage dropped slightly for February.

CodeWeavers working under contract for Valve on their Wine downstream Proton is out with a new update to their Proton 5.0 series.

Proton 5.0-2 is out with fixes over last week's big Proton 5.0-1 release that brought many features to this Wine 5.0 downstream focused on powering Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games nicely on Linux.

Valve has just released Proton 5.0-1 as a big upgrade to their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux under Steam.

Valve has just reported their January 2020 numbers from the controversial Steam Survey.

The Wine-downstream Proton that powers Valve's Steam Play is up to version 4.11-12 following a release today by a CodeWeavers developer.

I refrained from writing about Valve's Steam Survey numbers at the start of January when they were posted for December as the numbers didn't seem up to scratch. But half-way through the month now, the same numbers are up with no edits by Valve, as we've seen in some months when they refine their measurements.

Just in time for those taking advantage of Valve's annual Steam Winter Sale, a new release of the Wine-based Proton software is now available that powers Steam Play for running Windows games generally very well on Linux.

Valve has released Proton 4.11-10 and with this update to their blend of Wine that powers Steam Play is support for Halo: The Master Chief Collection among other Windows game improvements.

With the start of a new month always comes the excitement of seeing what Valve's Steam Survey is pointing at for gaming trends as to the percentage of Linux gamers.

While releasing the game on time might be more of a challenge, Valve did deliver in announcing Half-Life: Alyx as scheduled as their new flagship virtual-reality game.

Valve has confirmed recent rumors around one of their new virtual reality games in development being Half-Life: Alyx.

Longtime Linux game developer Timothee Besset has outlined the support introduced by Valve this week in their latest Steam Linux client beta for supporting Linux namespaces / containers. This experimental functionality may in the end provide better support for 32-bit compatibility as more Linux distributions focus solely on x86_64 packages, reducing some of the fragmentation/library conflicts between some Linux distributions and Steam, and other headaches currently plaguing the Steam Linux space.

Valve earlier today pushed out Proton 4.11-8 as the newest update to their Wine-based software powering Steam Play for handling Windows games on Linux.

With the start of a new month we are always eager to see what Valve reports via their "Steam Survey" for Linux usage (among other stats) for the month prior. The October 2019 numbers are now published but they don't indicate any Linux change in marketshare but with some odd indications.

The latest feature contribution by Valve's Linux driver developers to the open-source RADV driver is a "secure compile" feature.

SteamOS Brewmaster hasn't seen any updates in a while (SteamOS 2.195 came out this summer with minor updates) though recently Valve's SteamOS Compositor GitHub repository did see some activity igniting hopes we could see a new release still this year... Well, it would be really great seeing a release re-based to Debian 10 "Buster" but any activity would be welcome even just pulling in all of their Linux graphics driver infrastructure updates they've funded in recent times.

The promising ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver now has support for GFX10/Navi graphics!

Valve has released Proton 4.11-7 as the newest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

The Steam Linux marketshare measurement for September ticked up slightly and to the highest point we have seen in a a number of months.

A Steam beta update out today is notable for Linux gamers to avoid possible GPU crashes and corruption of the Steam overlay.

Just a week past the previous Proton update, Proton 4.11-6 is out today from Valve as the latest version of their Wine downstream powering Steam Play.

Barely a week since the release of Proton 4.11-4, Valve's stellar Linux crew in cooperation with CodeWeavers have issued Proton 4.11-5 as the latest update to this Wine 4.11 downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

In time for any weekend gaming, Valve's team maintaining their Proton downstream of Wine for powering Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux has issued their v4.11-4 update.

Due to the US Labor Day holiday, Valve was slow in updating their monthly figures for their controversial Steam Survey of hardware/software data by polled users. At least for their initial batch of August numbers they are reporting a small increase in the Linux gaming population.

While it feels like DXVK 1.3.2 was just released, it's approaching one month old already and has been succeeded today by DXVK 1.3.3.

Valve's Wine-based Proton for powering Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux is seeing more exciting work in their 4.11 branch.

While VKD3D continues to be under heavy development, Valve already appears pleased with it enough that it's now being built as part of their Wine-based Proton software for powering Steam Play on Linux.