Valve Offers Up Proton Beta For Testing Steam Play Enhancements

Just in time for the weekend Linux gamers, Valve has made available a Proton beta update channel for testing out the latest enhancements for their fork of Wine that also bundles in DXVK for accelerated D3D11-over-Vulkan and other performance/compatibility enhancements to optimize the Linux gaming experience.

Those running the latest Steam beta tonight for the Steam Play Linux functionality should now find a "beta" menu item under the Steam settings area for the compatibility tool to use for Steam Play support for handling Windows games on Linux.

With the current Proton 3.7-4 Beta available today via Steam, there is Python 3 support rather than being limited to Python 2.7, DXVK has been updated to DXVK 0.70 but the D3D10 support isn't yet turned on, better full-screen game integration, logging improvements with PROTON_LOG=1, controller enhancements, and other work.

Valve intends to maintain the Proton change-log along with their various other patches against this Wine fork via GitHub.

Hopefully this beta channel will become more interesting with time. At the moment there is little intersection between graphically interesting/demanding games that are running well today on Proton and those that are benchmark-friendly with Steam Play, which is why I haven't run any benchmarks yet, but as more Windows games begin working on Steam that meet our testing requirements there will certainly be driver/GPU tests on Phoronix. If you run into any interesting (automated-friendly) benchmark scenarios with Steam Play, feel free to share in the forums.