Proton 6.3-8 Is Here! Many More Games Work

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The state of Linux gaming through Proton is only getting better as time goes by. Just a few months ago Valve released Proton 6.3-7, and with it came a few more playable titles and bug fixes. Today, Valve has officially rolled out the 6.3-8 release. Here’s the entire list of games now playable on Linux through this compatibility layer:

  • Age of Empires 4
  • Assassin’s Creed
  • Breath of Death VI
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II singleplayer (202970)
  • DEATHLOOP
  • FIA European Truck Racing Championship
  • Fly’N
  • Game Dev Tycoon
  • Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered
  • GreedFall
  • Mafia II (Classic)
  • Magicka
  • Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (AMD GPUs only)
  • Mass Effect Legendary Edition (although apparently the audio doesn’t work yet)
  • Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom
  • Monster Energy Supercross - The Official Video Game
  • Monster Energy Supercross - The Official Video Game 2
  • Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl
  • Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness 3
  • RiMS Racing
  • The Riftbreaker
  • Sol Survivor
  • TT Isle of Man Ride on the Edge
  • TT Isle of Man Ride on the Edge 2

Some of these titles use Valve’s older CEG DRM. Thanks to this new release, these games should now work out-of-the-box.

BattlEye…a long time hinderance for Linux fans. Fret no more; ARK: Survival Evolved and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord are two titles that now officially work through Proton (ARK does have a native Linux version, but it is absolutely terrible). More titles that use this type of anti-cheat could potentially come our way; all the developers have to do is reach out to the BattlEye support team to enable compatibility.

NVIDIA’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling, similar to AMD’s FSR feature) is now working across games that use it, provided the player has an RTX-series graphics card. Both DX11 and DX12 titles support this. To enable DLSS, you first have to add this launch parameter to the game:

PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 %command%

You then have to copy over dxvk.conf into the installation directory of the game, then change:

dxgi.nvapiHack = True

to:

dxgi.nvapiHack = False

As it currently stands, this statement is at line 56.

Not only has there been a massive list of new games supported, several bugs and crashes were fixed in already working games/launchers:

  • UE4 games that use the Vulkan backend (including Project Wingman and Satisfactory)
  • Baldur’s Gate 3
  • RaceRoom Racing Experience
  • Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
  • Gahkthun
  • Fallout 76
  • Paradox launcher
  • Deep Rock Galatic
  • Industries of Titan
  • Bloons TD6
  • Project CARS 3
  • Warhammer: Chaosbane
  • Biomutant

Bug fixes include cutscene desyncs, networked multiplayer, crashes, audio stuttering, Alt+Tab issues, videos not playing, and more. The aforementioned list of games no longer suffer from those issues.

As per the case with every Proton release, some of the individual components that make up Proton have also been updated:

  • dxvk to 1.9.2-13-g714ca482
  • vkd3d-proton to 2.5-50-g0251b404
  • wine-mono to 6.4.1

There’s also some additional characters supported for Unity-based games, as well as the Cyberpunk 2077 launcher.

The update is now live, so upgrading Proton 6.3-7 to 6.3-8 should be as simple as downloading the update via the Steam client, then restarting said client.

Great news for Linux gamers, but especially for the Steam Deck, as this will create an even better experience for those who have never touched Linux or even a PC in general.