CyberPunk 2077 Safely Lands on Linux on Day 1

This is a day for the History book my friends! No, I am not talking about trivial, insignificant things that you may have seen on the news, but the fact that CyberPunk 2077 made it to Linux on this holy day of December 10th, 2020.

This is a feat enabled by Valve and their partners through a last minute release of a new Proton version, apparently focused on AMD at this stage, while the game has been reported to work both on AMD and Nvidia hardware so far. You want proof? Sure.

As you can see, while the game seems to work well for the above folks, the framerate is not that great considering the respective performance of such cards. This is early days and this means most of the Nvidia hardware out there will only be capable of 30 FPS for now. However, give it a few weeks and a few Proton and driver updates, I am quite confident we will see major improvements soon enough. I remember when GTA5 was basically a slideshow when DXVK was still young, and now the game on Linux runs almost at parity performance vs Windows.

Not everyone has been as lucky so far. You can see first the ProtonDB ratings are not all rosy yet, with several folks mentioning issues with running the game. Overall I would say it falls in a few categories:

• Game does not launch at all
• Graphical glitches here and there (textures missing, sounds missing)
• Poor performance
• Game freezing occasionally

But hey, for a day 1 release, the fact that it’s not even completely borked is simply amazing. You can also follow the bug tracker on Github as the situation evolves hour after hour.

Not directly related, but even console versions (PS4 and Xboxone) apparently suffer from poor performance as well. For once Linux gamers can also laugh at console peasants^TM too!

How about the GOG version? Well there are reports that the GOG version should work fine if you use Proton to launch it and compile vkd3d from the master branch, but I would prefer to wait a little to see that confirmed on AMD and Nvidia.

While I have been waiting for this day for months now, I have not bought the game yet (I will explain why in a separate post, as encouraged by Podiki), so I will need to gather the best of my patience until I get my hands on what looks to be another masterpiece from CDPR.

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