Well, think again.

Valve announced today the release candidate of Proton 5.0-7. A number of additions have been added:

• Street Fighter 5 is now playable. (bold mine)
• Update DXVK to v1.6.1.
• Update wine-mono to 5.0.0. Among other things, this fixes Fight’N Rage and Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries.
• Improve dsound performance, which especially helps Zusi 3 Aerosoft and TrackMania Nations Forever.
• Fix crashes in Halo: Spartan Strike, TOXIKK, Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, and Plebby Quest: The Crusades.
• Fix connecting to Gearbox SHiFT in Borderlands 3.
• Grand Theft Auto 4 is now playable.
• Updates to vkd3d to improve Direct3D 12 compatibility and performance in The Division, The Talos Principle, and Monster Hunter World.
• Improve developer debugging experience.

Chief among these changes is the playability of what we never thought would run: Street Fighter V. After doing some brief testing, I can confirm it runs out of the box, audio and everything included. For the life of me I couldn’t get my DualShock 4 to work, but after disabling Steam Input, then re-enabling it, it was back in business.

For the mid-range tower that I have (1050 Ti, 8th-gen i5, 8 GB RAM), though, the performance was meh. The game runs at a solid 30-40 FPS, but still feels like it plays in slow motion. It’s a little silly on Capcom’s part that you have to go through a brief tutorial on how to play the game before you can change the graphics options, but modifying the presets afterwards didn’t do much. For this reason, I didn’t want to include gameplay footage; I didn’t want to bore anyone. Those who are interested in trying this out might want to have a really beefy rig to get stable performance. But we’re in release candidate stages, so who knows, perhaps it will run smoother in due time. EDIT (4/29/2020): Actual footage added below.

EDIT: (4/29/2020) You can significantly increase the performance with a few tweaks:

• For NVIDIA users, add the PROTON_NO_GLSL=1 %command% to the Steam launch options. Now uncheck “Allow Flipping” is the NVIDIA X Server Settings application, by going to “OpenGL Settings” on the left pane
• For Intel users, change the CPU frequency to “performance” by running the following command in bash:
  echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu/cpufreq/scaling_governor
  OR
  Use gamemode run %command% if you have Feral GameMode installed*
• Disable your desktop’s compositor. In KDE this can be done with SHIFT + ALT + F12, in XFCE go to Window Manager Tweaks > Compositor > Uncheck “Enable display compositing”. Beware, you’ll lose some of the eye candy included with your desktop of choice.

Thanks to Linux Gaming Alchemy for pointing this out!

In regards to how Valve managed to achieve this, I’m not sure. One thing that I do know, is that they had to overcome both the anti-cheat service and DRM. Well done, fellas. The game is over four years old now, but it feels like it’s a brand new release for us Linux gamers. We now have one less game to dual-boot with our Windows partition.

Capcom had announced a while back that they were planning on having a native SteamOS/Linux version, but after years of silence the project was presumed dead. Ekianjo interviewed Timothy Besset, one of Valve’s employees, a few years ago, who was (and maybe still is?) working on trying to get the Linux port pushed.

“It’s not dead,” he said when asked about it. And that’s all the information we can pretty much get out of that, because “we cannot talk about it until the publisher is ready to actually say something.” So, in the meantime, we’ve got great innovations like Proton to keep us satisfied.

Thanks to GamingOnLinux for pointing this out.

Have you tried Street Fighter V on Proton yet? What has the performance been like for you? Or are you still salty at Capcom for never saying anything about the progress of the port? Let me know!

If you haven’t picked it up yet, the game is currently on sale on Steam until May 7. You might want to get the Arcade or Championship Edition, as a lot of the characters and stages aren’t available on the standard edition.

Note: you’ll need to opt in to the beta for Proton 5.0 in order to play Street Fighter V. Ensure you have it installed, then right-click it in your Steam library, go to Properties, and in the Betas tab, select “next” in the dropdown menu.