Wolfenstein: The Old Blood - Latest Steam Play Game On Linux Receiving Mesa Fix

While the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have matured into great shape particularly over the past two years for vastly improving the Linux gaming experience on Radeon and Intel hardware, with Valve's Steam Play allowing more Windows games on Linux via Proton/Wine has opened up Mesa to needing a lot more optimizations, workarounds, and dealing with other intricacies. The latest receiving the special treatment is Wolfenstein: The Old Blood.

With the latest Mesa Git, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood should now be working on Steam Play with the Mesa drivers or at least soon -- already it's been working out fine for Linux gamers on Steam Play using the NVIDIA proprietary driver. On this Saturday, Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux graphics driver team changed Mesa so ARB_vertex_buffer_object is now exposed in OpenGL core profile contexts by the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers. The VBO functionality was long ago promoted as a core OpenGL extension, but at least some games are looking for the ARB extension anyways. The NVIDIA proprietary driver was already safely exposing the ARB vertex buffer object extension and this behavior is required by at least Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. Fortunately, it's an easy fix for exposing this extension in core contexts and should satisfy this game and perhaps others.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood was released for Windows in 2015 and is powered by id Tech 5. With Mesa Git then this game will hopefully run smooth on RadeonSI at least otherwise it does seem to work just fine on the NVIDIA Linux stack.

Separately, over in the DXVK space, hitting its tree minutes ago for this Direct3D-to-Vulkan compatibility layer is a workaround so NVIDIA graphics cards are spoofed as AMD for Grand Theft Auto V with Steam Play / Proton. That appears to be good enough to get GTA V working now on NVIDIA hardware under Linux if you are using the latest components.