The last time we saw a stable Proton release was 6.3-8 back in November. Today, we have yet another noteworthy release, with many more games being playable.

As you can figure out by the name of the release version, Wine has been upgraded from 6.3 to 7.0. This release comes with new themes, support for more graphics cards (RX 5500M/6800 XT/6900 XT, Van Gogh – what the Steam Deck uses – Intel UHD Graphics 630, and NVIDIA GT 1030), better joystick support, Apple M1 support, improved Windows compatibility and multi-display support, and so much more. Wine 7.0 incorporates a year’s worth of contributions, after all. Read the release notes for more info.

DirectX-to-Vulkan (dxvk) has been updated to 1.9.4. This enables better performance with God of War and adds DLSS support. It can also potentially reduce memory usage with improved memory allocation behavior and improve GPU-bound performance and accuracy with RADV, plus a few other bug fixes.

Vulkan Direct3D-Proton (vkd3d-proton) is based off of the commits from February 4 (2.5-146-g33f17cc7). So it’s basically all the stuff from the 2.5 release and beyond (sorry, those commits are hard to translate into basic English). In any case, it probably means more game compatibility and bug fixes.

Finally, wine-mono was updated to 7.1.2, but all this release does is revert SDL from version 2.0.18 back to 2.0.16, due to 2.0.18 having a bug.

Besides the usual bug fixes (particularly for Sea of Thieves, Far Cry, Age of Empires IV, Mass Effect 1, Doom Eternal, Castlevania Advance Collection, Beacon, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, Marvel’s Avengers, Runescape, and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous), there’s improved launcher support for some titles, support for local decoding of H264 videos (finally!), and improved Steam Input controller support for games running through Origin. There’s also “various performance improvements” regarding windowing, input, and memory allocation.

Note that they also added this:

Added support for EasyAntiCheat if the game has enabled a Linux module.

It’s still kind of a chicken-and-the-egg problem right now, but hopefully we’ll see more EAC-enabled titles working soon, since Valve has made it easier for developers.

Games that are now playable with Proton 7.0-1 include Forza Horizon 5, a couple of Resident Evil games, Yakuza 4 Remastered, Persona 4 Golden, Oceanhorn: Monster of the Uncharted Seas, Monster Hunter Rise, Anno 1404, and plenty of other titles. See the full patch notes on GitHub.

Congrats Valve, CodeWeavers, and other volunteers who are contributing to making Linux gaming (and gaming on the Steam Deck) even greater.