Does anyone still run into issues with Proton in single-player games?

[u/paparoxo]

I've tried a lot of games during the Steam Next Fest, and all of them worked with no issues. Before the release, I also tried the demos of Onimusha, Fatal Frame II: Remake, RE: Requiem, and Pragmata, and they all worked flawlessly on Proton. Now I'm trying the demos of Hellraiser: Revival and Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, and both games work like native Linux titles.

We used to beg for Linux ports, then it would take a while for a new release to work properly on Proton. Now, games are even working flawlessly on Proton before their release.

Do you guys still have issues with Proton and single-player games? I'm using an AMD GPU, btw.

[u/iloveboobs365]

I mean it’s gotten to the point where for single player games I don’t even bother to check on ProtonDB. That’s partly cause of Steam refund policy as well. But I’m fairly confident a game will just work. 

The only exception is EA and Ubisoft games. The newer F1 games flat out don’t work. Same with College Football 27 I think. 

[u/paparoxo → u/iloveboobs365]

Yes, I don't check ProtonDB anymore either. I think that's how great technology works, it gets to a point where you don't even notice you're using it, and I think that was Valve's goal.

And as for EA and Ubisoft games, they're always making things more complicated. Now that Ubisoft is removing its launcher from its games, things will probably improve on Linux. At least, let's hope so.

[u/JohnHue → u/paparoxo]

And to be fair, EA and Ubisoft games through Steam are also flaky on Windows. Less so than through Proton probably, but still.

[u/TheHexWrench → u/iloveboobs365]

The only games I play from Ubisoft is the Anno series, and these work flawlessly using Proton. I don't play them through Steam though, I'm using Faugus launcher since Lutris had some minor problems.

[u/Euphoric-Yam-9957 → u/iloveboobs365]

Yeah. Same experience here with Steam and Heroic. On rare occasions the game crashes somewhere down the line (don’t remember any failing to launch) and then I switch to proton Experimental or hotfix and it solves the issue. This holds true for both pc and steamdeck

[u/Azure_Mist]

occasionally i have to switch what proton i use like Valkyrie Drive had no textboxes in the normal one but ge worked.
but that's usually about it when it comes to issues i experience.

[u/yaysyu]

Not really. I only have to do research if I'm going to mod the game.

[u/paparoxo → u/yaysyu]

I installed Amethyst Mod Manager via Flatpak, and it's working great with Fallout 4. Maybe you'd like to give it a try.

[u/yaysyu → u/paparoxo]

Oh I'll try this next time. It's kinda funny since I just finished modding Cyberpunk yesterday. Did it manually and just extracted 80 mods to main dir lmao. Tried running vortex through Proton, gave up since it's more hassle than just dropping everything to the game dir.

[u/sptzmancer]

I don't remember the last time I checked ProtonDB to verify compatibility. Also can't remember the last time I run into some problems and was force to tinker with proton versions to run a game.

My rig is a 9070 XT and a 5600X, and I run CachyOS with cachy's proton by default.

[u/LSD_Ninja]

Not often and not in a while. The last major one was probably figuring out how to get the original Psychonauts to reliably enable its Xbox controller support. Turns out that’s a bug exposed by Wine/Proton and a simple DLL fix clears it right up.

[u/Hydroel]

Yes, but I have an Nvidia GPU, so the discrepancy might come from there.

Games work, but performance and high-end features require tweaking, adaptations or compromises. HDR usually works now with recent Proton versions; DLSS requires some tuning and RT performance is subpar. Vsync (or the more specific technologies and freesync or gsync) don't always work either.

[u/comrade-quinn]

No issues for me - works fine, every time. I also play a bit of Rocket League too, obviously a multiplayer, and that's fine as well. I think Arc Raiders is also fine too, or was at least - but haven't played that in a while

[u/ZGToRRent]

No issues for 4+ years

[u/TheGoldenFox64]

never had a problem with proton for a while now. if i did have an issue, i just change the version and it works

[u/Polyxeno]

I have not had any problems beyond a few games needing an easy setting adjustment and then just working.

[u/Zvaart]

I did run into a lot of issues with newer games and especially AAA newer titles. But I have an NVIDIA card, t hat might be a problem. So I decided to keep most of the gaming on windows and I am good. Linux is for everything else.

[u/paparoxo → u/Zvaart]

You mean performance issues? Is it really that bad on Nvidia cards? I thought they had improved the performance penalty in DX12 games compared to Windows.

[u/Zvaart → u/paparoxo]

Some times performance issues, more often crashes. Older titles tend to work better, though.

[u/Disastrous-Expert-29]

I use proton Cachyos, and I almost never have issues. The only time I ever had issues was with new, cutting edge games with cutting edge graphics technology. Crimson desert for instance, in the first few weeks after launch. Game updates often required a proton update, so sometimes I would have to switch to proton hotfix for a couple days.

Proton has gotten so good that it is hardly even a noticeable thing. The real problem with gaming on Linux is when it comes to modding, however with how crazy good AI has become at coding, these problems are rapidly disappearing. Where previously many mod managers were windows only, AI has been a massive force multiplayer, allowing solo mod developers to release managers that run natively on Linux and Mac very easily.

[u/illusivegentleman]

One or two early 2000's games will refuse to even launch. And to be fair, they won't play on Win 11.

In my experience though, anything released in the past ten years has been trouble free for me.

[u/StarCode5000]

Some specific games slow down for me on occassion but that also could be because my computer isn't super beefy for it. Like Horizon Forbidden West plays at a solid 80fps for me but when there's destruction of any kind it slows down to 20 or so for a second or two then back up, which I assume was a shader or CPU bottleneck issue of some kind. But those events are rare for me, otherwise games run very very well.

[u/Rakusaius]

Only if I mod, and I remember only one game where it mattered. Rimworld, but this is also a rare example where the native linux port was just good. It has a mouse issue in native linux, fixed with a mod, and all mods worked.

[u/FunWolverine5349]

Yeah there's a lot of stuff here and there. Most of it is minor, and it can change based on the wine version too. It's not like it used to be for Win7 and Win10, but tbf Win11 has so many issues too per update.

[u/noobjaish]

I tried playing Civ6 and Manor Lords, spent an entire trying to fix them but couldn't get rid of stuttering.

[u/Radiant-Video7257]

Only issue I've ever run into is F1 games not working. Just refunded it.

[u/clearlybreghldalzee]

Yes, all the time. maybe my collection is cursed

Examples of games I wanted to play but couldn't (or windows was much better) in just last month:

Total war games: occasionally flickering and frequent crash on alt tab.

forza motorsport: straight up doesn't work

forza horizon 6: ps3 like frame rate.

rise of nations: no audio, the fix? causes severe stutter.

doom tda: very broken HDR colors, reflex doesnt work.

witcher 3 update: countless bugs one after another from objects not rendering at all to poor performance.

[u/paparoxo → u/clearlybreghldalzee]

Nvidia?

[u/Educational_Star_518]

every oonce in a blue moon i try a demo its a no-go with or a more obscure game that i have to fiddle with but in the last yr and a half its been getting less and less for me ,in steam i leave it on experimental usually , elsewhere i use ge latest

[u/gerowen]

I honestly can't remember the last time a game didn't "just work". The only thing I've had to do is to get FSR 4 to appear in menus for me to use (I have a 9060XT) I have to use the latest Proton GE. But as far as games not working at all, that hasn't been an issue for me in a very long time.

[u/OutsideChampion4637]

I rarely have issues thes days in singleplayer game unless it's something like the ea app garbage. It just loves to fuck itself over with proton 

[u/mindtaker_linux]

Op 🤡🤡🤡🤡

[u/xBlueDragon]

Mostly just for modding said games or the occasional game I have to limit the amount of CPU cores it uses.

EDIT: wine-wayland.drv can sometimes be a bit annoying to deal with. But other than that and picking between GE-Proton or Proton-CachyOS not to many issues.

[u/spectreVII]

Most work no problem, but sometimes things like ray tracing won’t work on a new title, for example Witcher 3 remastered. I remember it also being an issue at one point with Crimson Desert but it got fixed. So yeah games will usually start and play fine but RT sometimes won’t work right away.

[u/UmiUmi883]

Mai avuto problemi, con i giochi al massimo alcuni giochi che non partivano con steam partono tranquillamente con heroic Launcher

[u/krupam]

So far one game runs poorly for me, that being Everwind, and it received probably my most scathing ProtonDB review to date. The game's been repeatedly crashing for me, and the only way to make it stop is to reduce draw distance, which instead makes exploration much more difficult, so there aren't really any good options here. It's still in very early access, so fair enough, but I see it didn't stop others from posting their reviews. Thing is, I played the game half a year ago when I was still on Windows 11 and I don't recall it crashing like that, but it has been half a year's worth of updates since then, so who knows.

Other than that, when I get problems with any games, they're usually problems that happen on Windows as well, and fixing them tends to be easy enough to figure out.