this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
884 points (99.8% liked)
Steam Deck
17311 readers
99 users here now
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
Link to our Matrix Space
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
What does proton do?
I only vaguely understand it as "thing that makes game playable on other thing."
(And also I have six versions installed on my steam deck whydoIneedsixofthese?)
Proton is the compatibility layer that valve makes that lets you run games on Linux. Proton uses DXVK a program that converts Direct X API calls (windows only) to Vulkan API calls (runs on anything). DXVK alone gives you huge performance benefits (especially on older DirectX 11 and older games) and you can run it on windows.
Proton gives you a ton of other tools that can make huge performance differences.
Hopefully not a dumb question: If Vulkan runs on anything, assuming their game isn't a Windows (Xbox?) exclusive, why don't more people program their games to use Vulkan instead?
It's becoming more common, but it mostly comes down to available tooling. At this point all three of the big game engines have a Vulkan backend available, but that's a fairly recent development. And if a developer isn't using a game engine, writing their own openGL renderer is easy, and writing a Vulkan renderer is a nightmare.
Also a lot of old proprietary game engines were written either specifically for DirectX or additionally for DirectX because in the olden times it was the most advanced and compatible rendering software.
Then, those developers move forward in time to work on other engines and focus primarily on DirectX because it’s still good, compatible, and it’s what they know best. OpenGL languished and it took a while for Vulkan to come out, catch up, and standardize their API.
That my friend, is entering operating system politics.
But the TLDR is: resistance to change, lack of support, bribery, a combination of all 3, features, and much much more!
Because DirectX is more than a graphics API.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX
A fair amount of what used to make DirectX an everything API has been deprecated, but if you are already using Windows stuff for networking and audio, then you may as well use the graphics APIs too.
Vulkan is designed to be closer to the metal than something like DirectX 11 or OpenGL, which makes the API more explicit and difficult to use. This means it requires a great deal more care to use properly. And to complicate matters more, subtle bugs that are very difficult to debug are very easy to introduce.
But, this applies mostly to devs who build their own tech. Most of them these days are just using 3rd party engines like Unity or Unreal, so it comes down to whether or not the person making the game decides to check the box to use Vulkan and just how good those render backends are. Engine developers of 3rd party tech have to build their stuff to be as generic as possible. That's likely gonna add a lot of bloat that might not be fully optimized for every game developer's use case.
TLDR: It's tough and time consuming for someone writing it themselves. And for the ones who aren't, they're having to place a lot of trust in a renderer that is probably a black box and might be buggy/slow.
I'll add for completeness that vkd3d-proton handles DX12 titles, and of course OGL and Vulkan are supported natively.
Most simply put, it's a layer that allows a computer program expecting windows to run on Linux. It isn't emulating anything, just sorta like translating.
Think of it like a language. Windows speaks English, so a program expects to talk in English. But let's pretend like Linux talks Spanish. Proton translates the English commands to Spanish for Linux to understand and execute, and then Proton converts the responses back to English for the program.
The big thing though about Proton is that it's not an additional translation/emulation layer. It doesn't translate into Spanish for Linux, as that would be slow, it makes Linux talk English.
So in your example, imagine you, the English speaking program, want to catch a taxi in Madrid/Linux but all taxi drivers speak only Spanish. An emulation layer would be "translating", so you would have an additional guy in the taxi that you could talk to that talks to the Spanish driver. Proton is not that, it's an English-speaking taxi driver.
Proton uses Wine, which is a Windows system call API translation layer for Linux. In other words, it translates commands for the Windows kernel into calls for the Linux kernel.
So it's kind of an emulator and kind of not, but regardless the metaphor of a translator is fine. As a lightweight translator, you might say it's like using Google Translate on your phone to translate back and forth quickly and automatically, rather than having a person in the middle who needs to think about it.
In Software Design terminology, Wine and DXVK are "adaptor" layers (each convert one kind of API interface into a different kind - Wine doing Windows API to Linux API conversion and DXVK doing DirectX API to Vulkan API - and nothing more) whilst Proton is more a controller that just manages those things and adds some more functionality on top such as Steam integration for ease of use.
Without Proton users would have to know a bunch of command lines parameters and environment setup to launch all the right components with the right configuration so that they can first install and then run their Windows game in Linux. In fact this is the situation if you use Wine directly without something like Lutris to do a similar work as Proton.
Personally I prefer Lutris since it's more flexible - for example I can configure it to run games sandboxed with networking disabled - and it's not tightly bound to a single games store.
I used to use Lutris, but I found Heroic more consistent and convenient for filling the same purpose. It's quite good at downloading just the diff needed for GoG game updates these days, for instance, which is key for big games like Baldur's Gate 3.
I'd say it's something like a babelfish. You speak English, I hear Spanish.
I think the example you're using is closer to emulation.
I'm not an expert by any means, most of my technology experience comes from hardware. But Proton isn't changing the Linux ecosystem, and the programs are still expecting a windows environment when they're run via Proton.
From what I recall, Linux and windows can both do the same stuff, they just have different names or different ways to ask for resources. And Proton receives the request for whatever and converts it to the Linux equivalent.
It's not nearly as bad as it was in the past, now that the graphics APIs are system agnostic.
Well, technically speaking, neither would be emulation because both systems are running on x86.
I think it's what Valve has branded their fork of Wine. It translates win32 calls to Linux ones, and DirectX to Vulkan. Probably some other stuff too idk
Proton is Wine plus DXVK and VKD3D, as well as a big pile of little tweaks and out of tree changes that Valve maintains to specifically maximize game compatibility and performance.
It sounds a lot like what the GPU driver providers used to do (and probably still do, despite all DX12 and Vulkan's promises of making that unnecessary) on top of making the drivers.
And that is basically "fixing badly written games so they perform well on the hardware".
As far as I can tell, Intel has been using ~~Proton's fixes~~ DXVK to get their drivers working on older games on Windows
DXVK is not "Proton's fixes". It exists as a separate entity whose development Valve has helped fund and who Valve devs have directly contributed to.
Proton's fixes are out-of-tree tweaks to DXVK, Wine and VKD3D that, put together, make games work much more seamlessly and smoothly than they otherwise would.