I don’t know about you guys, but man is it HOT here! Walking under the sun makes me sweat in seconds and yearn for something cool to drink. Your best bet in such circumstances is to stay at home, close your binders, put air conditioning, crash in a sofa and play games all day like a lizard. And you have now a totally valid excuse to do so since Valve has released Proton 4.11, including a good number of changes:

• Rebased Proton on Wine 4.11 (3300 changes vs previous Wine version)
• Ships with D9VK (0.13f) that can be used as an optional renderer for DirectX9 games. This is a major addition and signals Valve’s official stamp of approval of this project. This may or may not mean that Joshua (who maintains D9VK) is contracted by Valve now. Note that if you want to use this for a particular game, you need to edit the launch options and put something like PROTON_USE_D9VK=1 %command%
• Experimental support for futex-based in-process synchronization primitives. I have no idea wtf this means, but this is seen as a replacement of esync. Note that this requires special kernel support so it is probably not enabled on all configurations.
• DXVK updated to 1.3, which is just 17 days old, so fairly recent!
• Support for OpenVR SDKs. Not sure how useful this is. Maybe someone can comment.
• Update to FAudio 19.07.
• Many WINE modules are now built as PE files (portable executable) instead of Linux binaries. It seems like this will help with DRM/anti-cheat system support in the future.

D9VK is certainly going to be a game changer if you were experiencing low performance with the WINE D9 renderer. For example I have Witcher 3 running fully at 60 FPS at full details while Dishonored, an older game, used to run with an unstable framerate somewhere between 40 and 60 FPS. With D9VK you can probably expect a bump in performance and framerate stability. Rocket League players may also want to try to play RL with D9VK instead of the native OpenGL version. I suspect it would perform better…

I’ll probably post some reports from users in the coming days.

Fantastic news for Linux gamers as always!