TheGameSquid
Published
The game requires you to bring up the Steam virtual keyboard a few times, which is especially annoying since you have to type in save game name every single time you save.
Despite supporting Steam Cloud, my saves did not appear on my other machines after playing on the Deck.
One of the absolute best experiences I've had gaming on Linux so far!
For reasons that aren't very clear to me, Steam's overlay doesn't work with the game. Unfort you can't use Steam's default screenshot mechanism because of this.
This game ran extremely well for me, completely out of the box, on day one. Using vanilla Proton 8.0-3, the game performs without a hitch. It ran at around 100fps at 3440x1440 (everything on max) for almost the entire game and barely dropped a frame. Only a few of the game's big bosses had visual effects that briefly (1 or 2 seconds) tanked the framerate. It never caused an issue. Furthermore, using a DS4 controller worked out of the box, and mixing the occassional use of the mouse caused no issues either.
There are two notable issues:
- Steam overlay doesn't work for this game (no need to disable it, it just doesn't show up). This is consistent with other reports.
- I couldn't get RT to work. I don't care that much about it, and it's only enabled on the AC assembly screen anyway so it's a very minor thing. I switched over the Windows to try it out, and the effect is barely noticeable anyway.
Personally, I did not experience some of the issues mentioned below.
- The game did not hang during the DirectX installation in Steam.
- I did not exerpience a single crash, even after the infamous Ch.1 boss fight. I completed the entire game as well as several hours of NG+. I never switched away from stock Proton 8.0-3.
- I did not experience a low frame rate, and I run everything on Wayland.
- The game had zero issues working with EAC, and the online functionality works just fine.
VKD3D_FRAME_RATE=100 %command%
For me DX11 performance was really poor. The difference when switching to DX12 was massive.
DX11 vs DX12
The game comes out of the box with a DX11 and a DX12 renderer. The game defaults to DX11, but with most settings turned up rather high, and at 3440x1440 resolution, the performance was really poor. Switching over to DX12 made a truly massive difference to me. With the DX11 renderer, I would call the game very unpleasant to play. With the DX12 renderer, I was very pleased with the performance. I expect that this will primarily affect people who play at high resolutions. I don't expect the impact to be very high if you're still on 1080p.
Ubisoft Connect
Shockingly enough, Ubisoft's annoying little launcher did not cause many problems for me. However I did actually experience one moment where I played a short bit on my laptop, and due to an issue with synchronization, some of my progress was overwritten at one point. I made sure to always keep a manual backup of my save games in order to avoid the issue coming up again, but it never happened again. Just a fair warning.
Despite being an overal bad PC port, this game runs very well under Proton. Aside from the issue with the opening FMV, it runs very well.
Despite switching to proton-experimental, which supports rendering the opening FMV sequence, it was displayed incorrectly with tons of graphical artifacts and distorted colors. No fix found.
Capped TDP at 9-10w, and the refresh rate at 40Hz.
The game starts with a mouse-based launcher that cannot be disabled. You're forced to smear your screen with your fingers every time the game launches.
The opening FMV does not render (though the game will gracefully skip these). Solved by switching to Proton Experimental.
The game ran almost as well on the Deck as on my desktop, and even managed to render the opening FMV correctly with Proton Experimental, which was not the case on the desktop. An excellent game to play on your Deck!
Absolutely fantastic experience.
Not only does this game run out of the box on vanilla Proton (as I've come to expect for most UE games), but it also performs very, very well. I ran this on a 3440x1440 resolution, with most settings maxed out, on a 100Hz monitor with FSR set to the Quality preset (in order to maintain a nice and stable 100fps). This made for a very pleasant experience. The framerate stayed pretty much even for the entire game, and the frame pacing was rock solid. Everything felt silky smooth and looked sharp and clear. On top of that, this is also a superb looking game in its own right (thanks in no small part due the developer relying more on the talent of the artists than on GPU taxing rendering techniques).
A small tip for those looking to play this: don't play with the English dub, it's awful and annoying. Switch to the Russian track, which is not only more immersive, but much better.
The game works just fine on Linux, provided you stick to the DX11 backend and can deal with some performance hiccups.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 %command& --skip-launcher
The game has performance problems in the final third act of the game, both on Windows and on Linux. This part simply needs more optimization. However, I did jump into Windows for some comparisons, and their does seem to be some degradation in performance to make it noticable in those areas. Maintaining 60fps on Ultra at 3440x1440 was mostly not possible in the later portions of the game with my hardware.
Very minor: In my 200 hours of playtime I experienced precisely two hard crashes.
I was completely unable to get the Vulkan backend working. Both stock Proton 8.0-4, Proton Experimental and Proton Hotfix gave me the exact same issue. Launching the game with the Vulkan backend causes a Wine-specific error upon entering the main menu. None of the game's patches resolved this.
As noted above, I could not get the Vulkan backend to work. However, even if you can get it to work, many reports indicate that it isn't the most stable either, so you may not even want to go for it regardless. I did not bother to try out using AMDVLK over RADV, so this might be something you might look into yourself.
In terms of stability, I did experience two hard crashes in 200 hours of gameplay. However, my brother has a very similar hardware setup to mine except with Windows 11. He experienced way more stability problems than I did on Linux.
I ended up using DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 over the internal frame limiter, as it seemed to give me slightly better results. I was able to get frame rates well over 60 in some areas, but decided to cap it nonetheless because the fluctuations were very wild.
Pretty much perfect
The game runs out of the box with vanilla Proton and performs very well. The game runs on a custom engine using modern OpenGL which works just fine. The only thing I noticed is that when you zoom all the way out on the word map, performance can drop a little because they're rendering the scene in the exact same way as when you zoom all the way in.
A truly fantastic game that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.
Unfortunately impossible to recommend in this state, as it crashes every 5-10 minutes.
The game crashes about every 5-10 minutes.
I tried running the game with both Proton 7.0-6 and Experimental, and in both cases the game crashed so frequently that it was basically impossible to play. I'll hopefully come back to experiment further later, but as an out-of-the-box experience this is impossible to recommend.
With Proton 7.0-3 I had a more stable experience, which was good enough to play through the game, but far from perfect.
Despite Proton 7.0-3 being much more stable, it still resulted in the occasional crash.
Upon completing the final mission, right when the ending movie is supposed to play, the game freezes. This happened to me twice, so I ended up having to watch the ending on Youtube.
At the advise of a report below, I compiled Proton 7.0-3 myself and had a better experience with it. The game remains somewhat unstable though, and I wasn't able to view the ending. Also, the game has a little launcher that's somewhat annoying to deal with.
The game works without technical issues, but beware that performance seems to fluctuate willdly on different systems.
Performance here is actually extremely uneven. On my laptop, which sports a RX 6800M, the game ran well enough at 1920x1080. It dipped below 60fps frequently, depending heavily on the scene and physics simulation. However, on my main workstation, where I use a 7900XTX at 3440x1440, performance was awful. For reasons I cannot explain, my GPU usage on my 7900XTX never exceeded 30%. Of course, the end result was terrible performance. I was never able to fix this, and stuck to playing this game mostly on my laptop in between.
I mainly played the Windows version under Proton after it initially seemed the Linux version performed worse. But clearly, using Proton also isn't without performance issues. This is a game that's fairly playable even with performance issues, but the terrible performance on my main system was very unpleasant. On my laptop it was not problematic enough to affect my enjoyment much.
MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display strangle 60 mangohud %command%
Not much to say here, as the native version works more or less as you'd expect. It's a Unity game, so I'd expect to work just fine under Proton as well.
One thing to keep in mind is that the game has no option to cap framerates. I played this on my laptop, which has a 144Hz screen, and that caused some serious heating issues. Since this is a native OpenGL game, you can't use DXVK_FRAME_RATE, and Mangohuds frame limiter doesn't always seem to work well for OpenGL games, so I capped the framerate at 60 using libstrangle, which usually works quite well for me.
Despite the game itself not being technically well made or optimized, it runs without issues using Proton.
Not a Proton issue, but this game isn't well optimized at all. Casting the highest level frost spell feels like it could cause the universe to collapse at any moment. I played the first game on Windows and it had plenty of issues there as well.
There were a few fights where the performance issues are very noticeable, but the game works just fine for the most part. Again, not a Proton issue, the game is in a pretty sloppy techical state.
A flawless experience.
There's not much to say here, as the experience is essentially flawless and performance is great. I played through the entire game with a DS4 controller, and that got picked up by the game with no problems whatsoever.
I played this on my laptop, but this is probably a fantastic game to play on your Steam Deck, since it's tailor made for controllers and performance rather well.
Launching the game will open up the game in a black screen, just like others have noted. All that's required to fix this is to use Protontricks with the following command:
protontricks 674140 d3dcompiler_47
As noted above, the black screen issue can be fixed by installing the proper d3dcompiler dll (ideally via Proton/Winetricks). If you want, you can also disable DX11 by launching the game with the following command:
PROTON_NO_D3D11=1 %command%
This will drop you into the game with either DX9 or OpenGL as the rendering backend. You can pick either one in the options menu. I do highly recommend you use the d3dcompiler fix though, as DXVK is at its best when used with DX11.
Works completely out of the box and runs well.
Not much to say here, works without any issues whatsoever and performs great. Unfortunately the game looks fairly godawful graphically speaking, so that's not really saying much. You should easily be able to crank out over 120fps even at the highest settings.
Both the Native and Proton versions work just fine out of the box!
When using a DS4 controller, you need to disable Steam input to get native PS button icons. However, in the Linux version, these icons were mixed up and incorrect. It's the only reason I ended up sticking with Proton.
Aside from the minor controller quirk mentioned above (which made me decide to use the Proton version), both versions work just fine out of the box. I'd recommend giving both a shot to see which one works best for you.
A flawless experience.
The game runs out of the box without any noticeable issue whatsoever. It was a little bit more performance intense than I perhaps would have expected considering the fairly simple nature of the presentation, but that's probably more of an issue with the game/engine than a Wine/Linux issue.
Runs great out of the box.
No tinkering required here, the game ran without any issues out of the box on stock proton. Do be advised however that this game basically has no graphics settings, which might be annoying on Deck or if you're on a potato PC.
Despite this port/remaster being of low quality, it does play just fine on Proton with only video playback being an issue.
The game's video won't play on either stock Proton 9 or Proton Experimental.
This game has a Linux version as well. Both version work just fine, but the Linux version's performance suffered quite a bit at high resolutions.
This is the very first game I've played since Proton 7 where I was unable to get video playback working either on vanilla or Experimental Proton. Very strange. I opten for the latest version of GE Proton (version 9-13), and that fixed the issue. There aren't that many videos in the game, so it's not a huge issue, but it was still odd to see.
Another rare example of a game that requires GE-Proton for video output, plus some serious port issues.
gamescope -w 1920 -h 1080 -W 3440 -H 1440 -S fit -F fsr -r 60 --rt --steam --fullscreen -- %command%
Playing this game on an ultrawide screen results in a cropped, see below.
Video playback
Ever since the Proton 8 days (or Proton Experimental in the Proton 7 days), almost no game out there has video playback issues on vanilla Proton. This one does however. The latest release of GE-Proton fixes this.
Fixed resolution
Since this is a Koei Tecmo / Omega Force game from 2016, you can expert this to be a rather terrible port. For some inexplicable reason, the game simply does not allow an internal resolution above 1080p. Even worse, if you have an ultrawide display like I do, the game displays a cropped version of the 1080p output, which I have never seen a game do in my entire life. The best solution in this game is to apply the gamescope command I listed above. The big downside there is that the game will still look awful (it's still 1080p output on a high-res screen), and it does introduce mouse input issues. However, it's probably best to play this with a controller anyway.
MANGHOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display strangle 120 mangohud %command%
Oddly enough the Native version actually didn't work for me. I was greeted with a black screen on startup and there was nothing I could do to fix it. Make sure to try it out for yourself though because I've seen a lot of positive feedback on it.
The game works perfectly under Proton though, even the bonus version of the original Maniac Mansion that's included as an easter egg. The only issue is that the game doesn't have a frame limiter. So if you have an incredibly high refresh rate on your display (like I have on my laptop), you might want to limit the framerate with something like libstrangle like I did here.
First, you need to go into the game's installation base directory and change the contents for the file direct2d.txt from true to false. This will allow you to get to the main menu and start the game.
However, for the game to render correctly, you need to apply the following fixes:
protontricks 1882140 gdiplus
protontricks 1882140 corefonts
This will effectively allow you to play the game more or less normally.
Even with the listed fixes, the game renders very sluggishly. This is noticeable when zooming in and out, or when moving the camera around. There is a significant delay to the camera movement. It's playable because it's a slow turn-based game, but it's a bummer nonetheless.
Apply the listed fixes and you should be able to play this game just fine, albeit the experience won't be as good as on Windows.
Technical details:
From what I can tell, the VR Design games use an engine written most likely in C#, using SlimDX to access Direct2D functionality. D2D is Microsoft's most recent API for handling all 2D rendering tasks in Windows. While Wine does have some functionality of Direct2D implemented, it does not implement all of it. Specically, D2D has a notion of "built-in effects", which are often-used effects with a readily-available in D2D. Specifically, the game is trying to use the "scale" effect to scale everything to the correct resolution from what I can tell. Trying to register this effect for use fails, since it's not implemented in Wine.
Fixing this would require the Wine developers to implement this scaling effect. However, this is not trivial, as these effects are supposed to executed on the GPU (and would thus require some shader code) but D2D is also interoperable with Direct3D, which is what makes this task challenging.
When settings direct2d.txt to false, the game falls back to using GDI+ (and older Windows API for 2D drawing). I suspect that the sluggishness of the gameplay comes from the fact that some very inneficient scaling is happening on the CPU when using raw GDI+.
This isn't the best performing game ever, but it's completely stable and work out of the box.
This game supports a DS4 controller natively, however, it doesn't work properly, as it would constantly register inputs on the right stick. To make this work, I had to enable PlayStation controller support in Steam, which makes the controller show up as a 360 controller in-game. So you won't have DS4 button prompts, which can be annoying during the many QTEs.
Performance
I believe the game doesn't have the best performance on Windows either, as this clearly wasn't the greatest PC port of all time. For most of the game I had about 60fps on Ultra at 1440p. There was the occassional dip, bit its fine for the most part. Shaders are compiled before you start the game.
Ultrawide
This port offers no support for ultrawide displays, which is really disappointing. There's a hack out there on PCGamingWiki that seems to work well. However, it has to hook the process and inject code at run-time, and that didn't work under wine clearly. So you won't have UW support on Linux
As a final note, I've seen some people below add reports where they configure VKD3D. This is complete nonsense, as this is a native Vulkan only game. There's no DX12 renderer. No VKD3D (or any other translation layer) is involved at all. Even weirder, they seem to try to enable DXR, which is even more bizarre, as this game has no ray-tracing support. So ignore that and don't copy paste these folks configs.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=120 %command%
When launching the game for the first time, be sure to select the DX9 renderer. It has excellent compatibility (thanks to DXVK) and runs really really well. Even on my laptop, I could easily hit 200fps most of the time, which I believe is simply the upper limit of what this renderer supports. I decided to cap the framerate at 120fps though with DXVK_FRAME_RATE=120.
I'm actually not a huge fan of all the mods that are bundled with Revision. However, the developers have through the many updates made this a highly configurable package, making this almost a mod loader. I recommend going into the settings and making sure everything is set to vanilla, including graphics, textures, music and level design. You can enable Human Renovation as a small fix pack. As a result, you get vanilla Deus Ex (still one of the absolute best games ever), but with cloud saves, achievements, the DX9 renderer bundled out of the box, and a few bug fixes an quality of life fixes.
Both the native version and the Windows version with Proton work just fine!
As others have noted, the native version does show a few quirks with multimonitor setups or screens that don't have a 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio. Other than that, both versions seemed to work perfectly fine to me.
This does not use an off-the-shelf engine, instead relying on a simple hand-rolled in-house engine. The benefit here is that the game is fairly well optimized and doesn't pack a whole lot of unnecessary baggage. In other words: this game should run well even on a potato. Both the Windows and native version use OpenGL.
The game is capped to 60fps by default, but it can be increased in the game's options.xml (the location of which differs based on which version you're using). It doesn't really impact a game like this that much though.
%command% -GameTime.MaxSimFps 60 -GameTime.ForceSimRate 60+
EA App
Since this is an EA game, much of your ability to enjoy the game depends on whether or not the EA App decides to function during the current moon phase. I've had times when it worked just fine, but during my playthrough of Inquisition it gave me plenty of headaches. Half of the time I started the game the EA App didn't work and I'd have to restart. Halfway through my playthrough, the app started malfunctioning again, and I was forced to switch to Proton Experimental to fix the issues with the latest update.
Ultrawide Support
This is one of those games that works fine on Ultrawide screens, except it arbitrarily decides to pillarbox cutscenes and cinematic conversations. Flawless Widescreen has a fix for the game. SteamTinkerLaunch has an option to use Flawless Widescreen, but every time I used it the EA App refused to work. I tried several other options to launch FW alongside the game, but the EA App malfuntioned every tme I tried this. No idea what's going on there.
Cutscenes locked at 30fps
The biggest issue that has nothing to do with Linux is that this game (in 2014) came with cutscenes capped to 30fps. The fix is passing -GameTime.MaxSimFps 60 -GameTime.ForceSimRate 60+ as command line arguments. This caps them at 60fps. This was still a bit awkward since the rest of the game ran at 100fps (my monitors refresh rate), but it's better than nothing and it seems that keeping the game at 60 anyway is better for stability. Unfortunately, the results are mixed, as some cutscenes are smooth, but others stutter heavily and don't manage to reach 60fps at all. This is not a Linux issue.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=100 WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" %command%
Performance
Despite having been released in 2017, this is actually a 2012 360/PS3 game. That means that it uses an older build of Capcom's MT Framework. The big downside is that it only supports DX9. That means performance on higher resolutions (1440p, 4k, 3440x1440, etc.) isn't going to be the best, even on Windows. Oddly enough, the most taxing area is the starting village (Cassardis). Thankfully, even in this area, I managed to stay just above 60fps. Other areas were usually at about 100fps.
dinput8.dll Mod
The famous dinput8.dll Mod unfortunately doesn't support all features on Linux. I still highly recommend you use it though, the savegame backup alone makes it worth it. Simply drop it into your game's folder and don't forget the WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" launch option! There's a config file in ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/DDDA.
- Set
savePath=/home/<USER>/.local/share/Steam/userdata/60719605/367500/remoteto allow the save backups to work. - Set
keyUI=0x7Aso that you can pop up the Mod screen with F11. - Unfortunately, only the Quicksave hotkey and the UI hotkey seem to work. The others do not. I looked at the code to figure out why, but it was too hacky for me too understand.
Agnostic Dragon
Agnostic Dragon is a tool by Kaldaien (of Special K fame) to make DDDA aspect-ratio agnostic. Unfortunately, it's implementation is very buggy and messes up several UI elements. Not only that, but it produces very strong graphical artifacts. I spent a long amount of time trying to fix this, but couldn't. Don't bother using it. In fact, I heave reasons to believe it doesn't work well on Windows either.
Runs perfectly out of the box.
Pretty much perfect, both the native version and Proton. There's no frame limiter by default, so if you have a very high refresh screen (like me, with 300Hz), then just use the usual DXVK_FRAME_RATE with Proton or libstrangle with OpenGL.
Despite the lack of native version being disappointing, the game runs well OOTB with Proton
I'm on Wayland on an Ultrawide display and I've experienced none of the issues mentioned by other reports so far. No sluggishness, no lag, no crashes and no issues when swithing windows. I haven't tried setting SDL_VIDEODRIVER to wayland so far.
Despite being a bare-bones port, the game works perfectly fine once you make a small DXVK tweak.
As other posts have noted, the game flashes heavily when you first boot it up. To fix this, just create a dxvk.conf file in the game's installation directory, and put the line dxgi.syncInterval = 0 into it. Problem solved!
Other than the change in the DXVK configuration tweak, this game worked pretty much perfectly for me over the 60+ hours that I played it.
Shadow of the Erdtree: Works perfectly without any significant issues, but at times the performance was not great.
python er-patcher --rate 100 -uva -- env MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display mangohud %command%
On my other machine, a laptop with a 6800M, the effect around torches made stone walls have a strange effect that made them look like frosted glass.
Certain areas were troublesome in terms of performance. See below.
My initial playthrough of Elden Ring in early 2022 was on Windows. My playthrough on Linux here was with my first character (thus on the save I initially completed on Windows), taking him through the expansion on Linux.
Easy Anti-Cheat
First off, some folks seem to be having issues with EAC. I started playing the DLC as soon as it was released, and I can't say I had any issues whatsoever with it. In fact, I have never had any issues with EAC on Linux. Armored Core 6, which also uses EAC, also did not give me any issues.
Performance
Performance-wise, there is some good news and bad news. On Windows, during my initial playthrough of Elden Ring, the game was plagued by an issue where the game would, at times, randomly freeze for 1 or 1,5 seconds. This was very annoying, especially if you were in combat. It was infrequent, but annoying enough that many people complained about it. I do not know if this issue still exists on Windows, but is is non-existent on Linux.
However, I did experience performance issues. At some points, especially in the game's second-to-last area (no spoilers), there was on particular view that seriously damaged my FPS. When looking at that area, my FPS dropped from 60 to the high 30s. What was so shocking however, is that every time I experienced a drop in FPS, this was directly related to a drop in GPU usages. When at one point I had 35 fps, my GPU usage sat at a meagre 40%. Whether this is an engine issue (and thus also experienced on Windows) or an issue with the DX12 layer (VKD3D-proton) I honestly cannot say, but it was a bit frustrating. However, the majority of my 60 hours of playtime did actually run just fine. There were just a few very specific areas that had issues.
Ultrawide and Higher Frame Rates
Unfortunately, ER still does not support frame rates higher than 60, and also does not support arbitrary aspect ratios. This is very disappointing, because Armored Core 6, which runs on a slightly more up to date version of the same engine used by Elden Ring, does support both of those out of the box. In order to make this work though, you can use the fantastic tool er-patcher by gurrgur. It's extremely easy to use with Linux is a great example of how to make game tools and fixes that are user-friendly and easy to use. Unfortunately, using tools like this of course disables online play, which is very sad.
Pretty much perfect.
This is probably expected considering the simplistic nature of the game's presentation and DS legacy, but I beat the entire game with no issues worth mentioning.
A fantastic game that runs without any major issues.
At the VERY end of the game, there's a video that plays summarizing your actions wraps up the story. This video does not play on Proton 9.0-3 or Proton Experimental. The sound plays for a little while but then freezes. I just reloaded the autosave right before the end and used Proton-GE just for this final video and the credits.
Unlike the previous two games in the series, this one runs on Unreal 4 rather than Unity. On my (pretty powerful) setup, the game ran maxed out at 3440x1440 at pretty much a locked 100fps. I don't recall any scenes where I experienced a significant dip.
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="winhttp=n,b" %command%
The game works perfectly out of the box, no issues whatsoever. It's probably a really good game to play on your Steam deck.
Mods:
Unfortunately, Square Enix did a pretty poor job with this "remaster". The presentation is way worse than previous re-releases of this game. I highly recommend the following two mods:
- Visual Revamp: https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasypixelremaster/mods/47
- Corneria Sans font: https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasypixelremaster/mods/21
The Visual Revamp mod is essential. To install it, please follow these steps to get it to work:
- Install the latest pre-release of BepInEx (6.0.0-pre2 at the time of writing). FF1PR is now an IL2CPP game, so you need the latest BepInEx release. You need the IL2CPP Win x64 version: https://github.com/BepInEx/BepInEx/releases/tag/v6.0.0-pre.2
- Install the latest Magicite release (2.2.0 at the time of writing), since only the latest releases are compatible with BepInEx 6.0.0-pre2: https://github.com/Silvris/Magicite/releases/tag/v2.2.0
- Install the UnityPlayer.dll that's patched to bypass the CRC checks: https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasy6pixelremaster/mods/101
- Now just follow the steps as described in the Visual Revamp README, just skip the BepInEx and Magicite steps, and do not overwrite the UnityPlayer.dll (since we just did that ourselves).
- Make sure to set
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="winhttp=n,b"to make BepInEx work.
Performance isn't the best for this game as a whole, but it should run out of the box on Linux with stock Proton.
This isn't a very well optimized game, and even with my hardware, I had to fiddle a little with the settings here and there to make the game run smoothly at 3440x1440. It runs a little worse on Linux than Windows, but performance on Windows isn't great either.
If the game doesn't allow you to hit a smooth framerate, I'd recommend fiddling with the object density settings a little. Those seem to have a fairly large impact on performance in general.
The game also comes with the launcher that most Slitherine games seem to have these days. Launchers tend to occassionally have issues on Linux/Wine/Proton (because they use web tech or .NET), but this one works just fine. Just hit "Play" and you're good to go.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 %command%
Due to a known issue with a Wine/Proton hack conflicting with GNOME/Mutter 43, you get a frozen black screen when alt-tabbing. This is fixed by switching to Proton Experimental, or by putting the game window on a separate workspace.
Two other minor issues:
- If you have a high refresh-rate monitor, you might want to cap the framerate with
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60since I got some weird fps readings before that. - There is also a very minor issue where the game shows incorrect tooltips on buttons that are deactivated/greyed-out. This really isn't that big of an issue (since they are correctly labeled whenever you can actually click them), and might not actually be Linux-related.
Despite those very minor issues, this ran really well. Despite being a little old, the game had all the conveniences you would expect from a modern game, and it's really fun and challenging.
Runs without issues.
This charming little game works very well, and even if there were any serious issues, the game is so short you probably wouldn't even have the opportunity to notice them.
Runs without issues.
Really nothing much to say here. Like the previous two games in this series, the game runs out of the box without any issues, certainly nothing you'd notice in the 60-90 minutes runtime.
Work really well, with some potential late-game performance hiccups.
This runs on 11 bit's own in-house DX11-based engine called 'Liquid'. I had zero technical issues with the game during my entire 25-hour or so playthrough. The game feels as 'out-of-the-box' as it gets.
That being said, as your city grows large in late-game, you might begin experiencing performance problems. While I had no issues cranking out 100fps at 3440x1440 on Ultra throughout most of the game, in some of the scenarios that started seriously tanking in the final hours. I THINK this was especially noticeable in a city where I had a lot of smokestack chimneys (and thus graphical smoke effects).
Your milage may vary I think. Some of the people below say performance doesn't matter in a game like this, but I think this game is the exception, since its incredible presentation really does add a lot to the experience.
30 FPS for better battery life
Pretty much a perfect experience on Steam Deck. Dropping down to 30 FPS also gives a pleasant battery life experience.
Essentially flawless.
Played through the entire game without any issues to speak of. There was one very specific scene where I did get some odd framerate spikes, but I can say with 99% certainty that this was due to the way this scene was constructed inside the Unity engine rather than a Linux-related issue (and thus the framerate spikes likely appear on Windows as well).
As expected, this runs flawlessly out of the box.
Nothing to add, this works exactly as well as you'd expect. If you want to limit the framerate you'll have to bring your own frame limiter. Since this is a D3D12 game (remember, this uses the RE Engine!), you can use VKD3D_FRAME_RATE since the release of VKD3D 2.14. Otherwise use libstrangle or mangohud.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=100 MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display mangohud %command%
Throughout my entire playthrough I had two crashes because some memory allocation routine failed. It's a bit annoying when it happened mid-mission, but 2 hard crashes in about 40 hours isn't super shocking.
Surprisingly, the annoying Rockstar launcher didn't cause any issues, so that's one thing you don't have to worry about.
When you first boot up the game, you'll be greeted by an intro screen where you pick between GTA Online and the Story Mode. For some reason, this entire screen was very sluggish for me, with extremely sluggsh and laggy mouse movement. As soon as you drop into the Story Mode though, everything works fine.
The game defaulted everything to the absolute lowest graphical settings for me, so it's probably a good idea to make sure you go over all the different settings and adjust them accordingly.
It set my frame cap to 100, as it's the refresh rate of my monitor and vsync was giving me some slighly odd readings. Despite my rather overpowered hardware, the game did struggle every once and a while to reach 100fps. There were some sections were it dropped to the mid 80s. But for 90-95% of the exerpience, it was just a rock solid 100fps.
Essentially perfect, and performance was better than expected as well!
At some point midway through my playthrough, the game launched into windowed mode for some reason, but since it was still at my desktop's resolution, the bottom part of the screen was cut off. This made it impossible to click on the apply button in the settings screen, thus rendering me unable to put the game back into fullscreen mode. There's probably some settings file somewhere that I didn't immediately find, so I just used gamescope to start Steam in a 800x600 screen so that the game opened at that resolution as well, and I was able to fix the issue. Never had the issue again.
Aside from the windowing issue I experienced, there's not much to say here. During my 20 hours or so I had absolutely zero issues, and the game played very nicely. I had zero issue running this at a super stable 100fps at 3440x1440 with Max details (though I admittedly have pretty overpowered hardware). I gave it a short go on my laptop as well, where I was also able to keep an super steady 60fps going.
Works out of the box on vanilla Proton and runs quite well.
As expected, this is a UE4 game and runs completely out of the box. It's a slightly older game at this point, but it still looks fantastic, and it runs very well too.
Since 2021, the game has had a next-gen update. This includes decent ultrawide support, a DX12 renderer and the option to enable ray-traced shadows. I chose the DX12 renderer over the DX11 one, and it performed exceptionally well. Not only did I get my desired frame rate with room to spare, but the frametiming was rock solid.
I did not try out the raytracing this time around because: One, RT on Linux often doesn't work for me. Two, this game was designed without RT when it first came out. And three, RT is honestly almost never worth the performance penalty.
This is not a perfect port, so expect some potential issues with performance, but from a technical standpoint the game runs perfectly.
RADV_PERFTEST=gpl %command%
As you probably know, this port had quite a few issues at launch. Even with most of those ironed-out, I still feel performance isn't quite what it should be. I did have quite a few instances of unexpected FPS drops here and there, and I decided to cap my framerate at 60, because anything above that just fluctuated too much. That being said, I did play through the entire game with everything on Ultra at 3440x1440 with a mostly steady 60fps.
This is actually the first game I played on Linux that relied entirely on VKD3D-Proton (since it's exclusively a DX12 game), so I wasn't sure what to expect. My experience with this game at least is that there seemed to be a basically no issues whatsoever in terms of accuracy, and I think I saw exactly one teeny-tiny graphical glitch that lasted a few seconds.
Do note that I turned on Vulkan GPL through RADV_PERFTEST=gpl, but I'm not sure how big the impact was, if any, as I didn't do any detailed measurements.
Works out of the box with only a teeny-tiny issue.
For some reason, the mouse cursor didn't display correctly, so it's black-ish in color.
No issues found for both the native version and the Windows version under Proton.
I played both the native and Proton version extensively, and struggled to find any issues with either. I do think the native version suffered a little from alt+tab issues every once and a while, but nothing all that noteworthy honestly. I'd say pick your poison, as either option is going to give you a version that plays really well.
I thought the Enhanced Edition of BG1 was rather sloppy, but this one is very stable and adheres perfectly to the vanilla 2000 experience plus QoL upgrades.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 %command%
This isn't a super-polished game, and performance isn't the greatest. I therefore did decide to set the max frame rate to 60 via DXVK, as it was seriously hammering my GPU. The game itself has very little graphical options unfortunately.
MANGOHUD_CONFIG="fps_limit=100,full,no_display" gamescope -W 3440 -H 1440 -r 100--rt --steam --fullscreen -- mangohud %command%
There was very occassionally some crackling audio, particularly at the start of a session. It wasn't very significant and it didn't bother me that much.
I'm on Gnome 45, and by default the game doesn't capture mouse clicks correctly when you get to the main menu. It instead forwards those clicks straight to your desktop. See below for a solution.
If you need to fix the mouse capturing issue, there are two solutions:
Solution 1: Launch the game in Windowed mode
You can find the game's configuration file here:
~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1084160/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/Jagged Alliance 3\LocalStorage.lua
Change the following line:
Options = {
DisplayIndex = 0,
FullscreenMode = 0, // <---- ADD THIS LINE
MaxFps = "120",
Resolution = point(3440, 1440),
VideoPreset = "Custom",
},
The game will then launch into Windowed mode, which will capture your mouse clicks correctly. You can simply switch back to fullscreen by using ALT+TAB or changing it in the settings menu. Important note: You need to do this every single time you launch the game.
Solution 2: Gamescope
If you use gamescope, you won't have the mouse capturing issues. I changed the launch options to:
gamescope -W 3440 -H 1440 -r 100--rt --steam --fullscreen -- %command%
This worked just fine for, it resolved the mouse capture issue, and you don't need to do this every time you launch the game. Just set your launch options and you're good to go.
Additional issues:
The game hard crashed twice dring my entire playthrough. However, considering I played for just over 90 hours, I think that's not a bad number at all.
While it does require some beefy hardware to run, the game works perfectly on Linux!
For some reason Steam claims that a DS4 is not supported (but a DualSense is). Therefore, Steam opts to default emulating your DS4 as an XInput controller. This is actually incorrect, as the game supports using a DS4 directly. So, in order to get correct button mappings for your DS4, simple disable Steam input for this game, and you're good to go.
This is the very first Unreal 5 game I played on Linux, and was pleasantly surprised that (like most UE4 games), compatibility was pretty much perfect. The game has no technical or compatiblilty issues for me. The only thing worth pointing out is the DS4 issue mentioned above. Just launch it on vanilla Proton and you should honestly be good to go.
For those needing a fix for the unfortunately weak ultrawide support, check out this patch by RoseTheFlower.
This is a very recent game running on Unreal 5 and makes use of some of UE5's newer lightning techniques. It therefore does require somewhat more recent hardware. I played this when I only had my RX 6800M laptop on hand, and was able to get a stable 60 fps by lowering some of the settings and using FSR 2.0 on the Quality preset. Lowering the settings does reduce the effect of the art style a little though, as it heavily relies on somewhat flat and untextured terrain being lit by UE5's new atmospheric lighting. The game still looked good for me though, and the framerate (and frame pacing) was rock-solid once I found the sweet spot.
This port isn't the greatest, but it works pretty much perfectly on Linux.
As others have noted, the game boots straight into gameplay, and you have to finish the tutorial before being able to go into the settings to change the game's resolution and windowing mode. An annoying decision, but there you have it.
This port unfortunately has problems. And while it's a shame that such an all-time classic didn't receive some more love, none of the actual issues are related to Linux/Wine/Proton. And even with all of its issues, this is still a super fun game that works out of the box on Linux.
PROTON_NO_D3D11=1 %command%
- When viewed at a slanted angle, the water effects become distorted.
- Fonts are not rendered correctly. The thin fonts look a little too thin and the bold font has some artifacts around it. Nothing too bad, but it's noticeable.
This ran very well on two of my machines, but there are two things I should point out that might be important:
- Proton previously shipped with a hack that allowed for smoother alt-tabbing, but this hack is no longer need on GNOME/Mutter 43, and actually conflicts with it. This causes a black/frozen screen when alt-tabbing. Right now (11 March 2023) there's a fix for it in Proton Experimental, which I assume will make its way into stable later.
- On my Desktop workstation (with has an RDNA2 card) I had to add
PROTON_NO_D3D11=1in order to launch the game. Otherwise the game ran into a driver detection issue. This is bizarre, as KB uses DX9. This was not needed on my laptop with an Nvidia card.
Aside from those two things, I suspect you will have very few issues running this little classic.
30fps cap
Some of the prompts at the bottom of several screens are a bit hard too read, but nothing major.
A flawless experience on stock proton.
I encountered pretty much zero issues with this one after playing through the entire game. Considering it performed rather well and plays great with both mouse/keyboard as well as gamepad, I fully expect this to be a great title for the Steam Deck as well.
The game works perfectly out of the box on Linux with no notable issues, but beware that does not perform very well on any platform.
This is simply not a well optimized game. Performance on Windows is quite bad as well. It's game-related problem, not a Linux issue.
Like I said, this is a game that will struggle to maintain even a solid 60fps on all platforms, not just Linux. This is made more annoying by the fact that there are not a lot of graphical options. There's also the additional factor that this game has no support for Ultrawide screens whatsoever, which is disappointing.
This game should not be rated silver here. This is modern Unity game, and pretty much all modern Unity games run out of the box on vanilla Proton. I seriously question the reliability of the negative reports below.
Works perfectly out of the box!
The game can be a teeny tiny bit buggy at times, but it works and runs totally fine.
Works perfectly fine on Linux, despite some optimization issues.
The first time I quit the game, it crashed to desktop with an Unreal Engine error report. This only happened once and never again.
This is an Unreal Engine 4 game, which, as expected, runs out of the box on Linux. The game is well known for not being very well optimized (not a Linux issue), and that is occassionally noticeable. Still, I was able to pump out a rock solid 100fps at 3440x1440 and most settings at high or max (with my overpowered hardware), and the scenes where it dipped below that were not too common.
There's a teeny tiny issue where there's a little window on the main menu that I believe is supposed to show the latest news or something, but that doesn't work. Zero impact.
Ran pretty much flawlessly for me.
This should not require any tweaking or tinkering, just install with the suggested proton version and have fun. Two small remarks:
- There were one or two scenes where there were a lot of enemies on screen where I experiences a somewhat unexpected framerate dip. Otherwise ran very well at max settings on 3440x1440.
- Some people complained in other reports that they noticed audio sync issues. I did not experience this, but the game's setting has a built-in tool that allows you to sync any potentional delays in audio and input. Make sure to check that out in the settings if you have issues.
Works very well on Linux provided you have solid hardware.
For some reason my OS mouse pointer would always overlay on top of the game screen. This meant that I had to move my pointer to the corner of my screen all the time. A minor annoyance, but it is the first game I've ever experienced this with.
Performance
While it did make my GPU run fairly hot at times, I was able to crank this up to maximum detail on 3440x1440 while maintaining a rock solid 60fps. I don't think it ever dipped below that even once. I did decided to cap it at 60 because above 60 it fluctuated quite heavily, but it was a very smooth experience nonetheless.
DX11 vs. DX12
As you've probably noticed, there are a lot of comments regarding the efficacy of the DX12 renderer vs the DX11 renderer, with reports varying wildly. I can only attest to the following:
- The DX12 renderer performs slightly better in my experience. It was able to match the performance of the DX11 renderer, but was able to keep my GPU at a lower clock while doing so. This was especially noticeable on my workstation, where I'm running the game at 3440x1440. On my laptop, where I ran the game at 1920x1080 and slightly lower settings, the difference was negligable. However, as others have noticed, the DX12 introduces some frame pacing/stuttering issues that is noticeable. It's not as bad as in other games, but I definitely noticed it and it did annoy me.
- The DX11 renderer performs slighly worse than the DX11 one, but does not suffer from any stuttering, and is a smooth and clean experience throughout. I'd recommend trying both.
Multiplayer
I played a good chunk of both single and multiplayer, and I had absolutely zero issues playing this in MP. My brother was playing on his Windows 11 machine, and I was playing on Linux, and the experience was completely smooth, without any connection issues. From my experience, you should be able to freely play this with anyone you want without any problems.
Works completely as you'd expect out of the box!
When I played this on my laptop, there is a specific scene that appears shortly after starting a new game after finishing the game for the first time, that completely locked and crashed my laptop at the exact same frame every time. I was able to get past it by playing on my desktop. This has never happened to me before in any game on Linux, and I cannot explain it. I completed the game with all endings, and never encountered a similar issue.
You get solid performance and no noticeable issues out of the box with vanilla Proton.
One important note: there is a specific Special K submodule that has a bunch of fixes for this PC port. My advice: do not use it. The most important fix, the unlocked framerate, does not seem to work on Linux. Furthermore, Special K caused a ton of other issues for me, like my controller not properly working, the screenshot functionality being broken etc. Even when turning all unwanted features off, I still had issue I didn't have without Special K. I definitely do not recommend using it.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=120 %command%
As you'd expect, this is about as flawless as it gets. It runs out of the box with zero issues. My laptop has a 300Hz screen, and the game automatically enables Vsync without a framerate cap ability, so I just capped it at 120fps with DXVK_FRAME_RATE=120.
The game's performance and stuttering seemed to be improved somewhat by adding the following lines to boot.config in Pathologic_Data in the game's installation directory:
gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1
The game runs, but it's not a very well optimized game in general, and framerates swung wildly between 60 and 100 on my workstation, and would dip into the low 40s on my laptop.
When exiting the game, it doesn't close properly. Any other method will work fine though: close it from the Steam client, pkill it, force quit it through the desktop environment. It's annoying but hardly gamebreaking.
As mentioned, the overall performance of the game is the biggest issue. Even on powerful hardware the game's framerate can swing rather wildly. It's all part of that lovely jank.
Pretty incredible game otherwise, so try to stick with it.
This game plays perfectly on Linux, as long as you take the initial step of removing SpeechSynthesisWrapper.dll from the plugin folder.
As others noted, the game will not launch unless SpeechSynthesisWrapper.dll is deleted from Pentiment_Data\Plugins\x86_64. Note: this will disable the speech synthesis accessibility option.
When switching scenes (enter/exit a house, engage dialogue etc.) both the top and the bottom of the screen show a thin artifacted line for a brief moment. It's very minor but noticable. Confirmed that this does not happen on WIndows.
A fantastic game in its own right that plays very well on Linux without major issues.
Aside from a small windowing issue, the game is essentially perfect.
Alt-Tabbing can cause the game window to become teeny tiny, preventing you from getting back into the game.
To prevent the alt-tabbing issue on fullscreen, just make sure to set the game to borderless fullscreen. Otherwise the game is basically perfect, and potentially runs a lot better on Linux than Windows.
Works completely as expected out of the box.
Not much to say here, as this one doesn't require a whole lot to run. There's not a whole lot of graphical options either. If you want to cap the framerate, use DXVK_FRAME_RATE, the mangohud frame limiter, libstrangle, or the gamescope frame limiter. The choice is yours, all of those seemed to work just fine.
Works flawlessly out of the box!
Cloud save syncing sometimes failed. Trying it again a couple of times eventually fixed it, but it's a weird issue nonetheless.
Really nothing to add here. It runs perfectly without any noticeable issues on stock Proton.
RADV_PERFTEST='rt' VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11,dxr WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8.dll=n,b" %command%
As others have noted, there are three problematic video sequences that don't work. There's the "Village of Shadows" intro cinematic when you start a new game, which has a follow-up vdeo right before the credits. Those do not work. Then there's also a video which is projected unto a screen halfway through the game. This one does show something, but is transformed and artifacted. All other videos, including the RE7 recap video and credits, work just fine. The video that don't work do not impact story or gameplay, as the entire "Village of Shadows" cinematic is irrelevant, and the projector video does not impede your ability to solve a puzzle.
THIS REPORT DOES NOT DISCUSS THE DLC!
Aside from the video issues mentioned above, this was (at least for me) the single best gaming experience I've had on Linux so far. The game works perfectly from the very first second. Performance is simply incredible. I ran the game maxed out (but with RT disabled), and I hit a consistent 100fps (which is my monitor's sync rate), and my GPU still had a bunch of room to spare. I swear I don't think I've seen the game drop even a SINGLE frame in my entire playthrough, and the latency graph was perfectly smooth. It was honestly incredible. Others have reported stability issues and crashing. I had no such issues whatsoever. Zero crashes, zero performance issues, no sign of memory leaks.
Ray-tracing
I wanted to try enabling ray-tracing since this game has a ton of moody lighting. Contrary to other games I've played with RT, I was actually able to enable RT with the right environmental variables set. However, while in-game, I don't think any of it actually worked. Curiosly it did have a significant impact on performance (enable/disable made a difference of around 20% GPU utilization), but I never was able to observe any RT effects. I think it's borked. However, this game looks amazing without it either way, so it honestly doesn't matter.
REFramework and FOV
I play on a 3440x1440 Ultrawide display, and while the game works flawlessly on this, the FOV is very problematic (I suspect on other screens as well). Within about 30 minutes, I had to save and quite the game because I felt like I was becoming sick. REFramework (https://github.com/praydog/REFramework) thankfully works out of the box on Linux and has a built in FOV solution out of the box. Just download from Github, drop the dinput8.dll into the game installation folder and include WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8.dll=n,b" in the launch options. The game will starts with an imgui-style window overlay on the left, and you'll be able to set various options there. I changed FOV from around 80 to a 100, and that was a huge relief. I also reduced the vignette effect via REFramework, since that was overtly present on Ultrawide as well.
After playing the Shadows of Rose DLC, I can confirm that this works just as well as the base game.
RADV_PERFTEST='rt' VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11,dxr WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8.dll=n,b" %command%
THIS REPORT IS ABOUT THE DLC!
Some other reports seemed to indicate that the game had technical issues in the Shadows of Rose DLC. Now that I've played through it, I can only say that for me, the game ran just as well and was just as super stable as the main game. If there are technical issues with this DLC, they did not affect me in the slightest.
REFramework works just as well with the DLC as the base game. Though this DLC forces you to play through it in third-person mode, so the FOV issue is likely to be slightly less crucial than in the base game.
Pretty much perfect.
There's very little to add here. This is a very straightforward and faithful port of a classic PS1 game, it functions pretty much flawlessly.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 %command%
- One very minor graphical detail I noticed was that wires on wired fences were not visible. This was actually a little annoying though I can't confirm that this is a Linux/Wine-only issue.
- Switching over to the DX10 renderer and enabling some of the exclusive features there can give unpredictable or completely broken results. Stick to DX9 and you'll have no issues.
I was able to play through the entire game with almost zero issues, as long as you do two things: stick to the DX9 renderer and install the Sky Reclamation Patch 1.1.4 (don't forget to apply the additional widescreen fix included). This gave me a very stable vanilla game that ran and played very well, no mods are required to enjoy the game like this.
As expected, this one runs out of the box without any major issues.
This is a modern Unity game, the vast amount of which run out of the box with little to no issue on the latest stable releases of Proton. It's pretty easy on your resources, at least for a Unity game. I'm fairly confident this should run fairly well on quite modest hardware. Similarly, even though I didn't play it on my Deck, this seems like the ideal kind of game to play on your favorite portable PC.
The only thing that bothered me a little, what that whenever your turn the camera when on the world map, it gives the illusion of rotating at a somewhat unstable framerate. The movement feels jittery. Oddly enough, Mangohud didn't report any frame rate issues or frame pacing issues. Not sure where this came from. it's not a big issue, but it was noticeable.
cmd=(%command%); cmd[-1]="$STEAM_COMPAT_INSTALL_PATH/SwGame/Binaries/Win64/SwGame-Win64-Shipping.exe"; "${cmd[@]}"
Renamed installScript.vdf so that the EA App doesn't get installed.
EA App
As usual with any EA game on Linux, the biggest potential problem here is the infamous EA App. In this instance, it prevented me from using the Steam overlay, and my controller did not work properly when it was running. So, I took the following actions:
- Reinstalled the game entirely (I deleted the Proton prefix in
compatdataas well to be sure) - Before even launching the game a single time, renamed
installScript.vdfso the EA App does not get installed upon first-time launch. - Changed the launch command. It replaces the binary in the Proton launch command so that it bypasses the EA App and boots straight into the Unreal binary.
The biggest downside to this is that you won't be able to unlock any achievement. However, don't worry about it too much, since these barely work with the EA App anyway, and a quick google shows that Windows users have tons of achievement problems as well. If you really need achievements, just unlock 'em with one of those achievement tools. The game works way better with the EA App disabled.
Performance
Overall, the game performs really well. Despite this being a DX11 game, I was able to crank out a pretty solid 100fps for most of the time at 3440x1440 with everything on max settings. There are a few areas on a certain planet that can tank performance a bit, but never under 70fps. It's a great experience, the game runs well, and looks really great.
The game's sequel, Jedi Survivor, is infamous for having serious stuttering issues. This game also suffers from this unfortunately, although to a lesser degree. And based on my own observations, the issue is less pronounced on Linux with DXVK.
Ultrawide support.
The game has ultrawide support, but no FOV slider and unfortunately does pillarbox cutscenes (even though 99% of them are in-game). There's a fix out there by RoseTheFlower over on Github and WSGF, but I could not get it work on Linux :(
gamescope -W 1920 -H 1080 -r 60 --rt --steam --fullscreen -- %command%
I ended up deciding to play the game under Proton, and not the native version, though both versions seem to work just fine. I just wanted to make sure that I could use a few mods without issues.
My experience was great overall, with these minor issues:
- During startup and whenever a pre-rendered cutscene loads, the game window would lose focus. I used gamescope to fix this.
- Every once and a while when I started up the game, the main menu would have no music. Whenever this happened, I would not be able to load. Just restart the game to fix this.
- The game has a very old OpenGL renderer, and Aspyr's version doesn't seem to have improved on it a lot. There are a few scenes (especially where there are a lot of NPCs on-screen) that can cause some unexpected performance dips.
- Prerendered cutscenes load very slowly, so don't worry when this happens. They play just fine, you just have to wait a little while for them to start.
VKD3D_FRAME_RATE=80
Works pretty much out of the box on vanilla Proton. Performance wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. I put everything on high or ultra on 3440x1440, set FSR to the Quality preset, and I was able to get a framerate somewhere between 80-100. I ended up settling on capping the FPS at 80 for a more stable experience.
By late game performance had made a significant downturn, but still only dipped below 60fps in the most intense parts of my massive factory.
This is the first game I've ever played that supports AMD's FSR Frame Generation. I tried it out for a bit, but it made my mouse movement feel so sluggish and awkward that I immediately turned it off. For me it was 100% unplayable.
In over 150 hours of playtime, I experience a single hard crash, as well as one network error. I played through most of the game together with my brother, and there were pretty much no issues. I was the host for most of the time, and this had no impact whatsoever.
Pretty much flawless.
Really not much to say about this one. It works flawlessly, with zero technical issues or crashes throughout the entire playthrough. Performance is decent, though cranking up all the settings at 3440x1440 made the fps sometimes dip below 90 even on my machine.
Works totally fine out of the box.
The game has no serious issues to speak of. The only thing worth mentioning, is that I had a slightly annoying issue in larger areas (specifically in the British Museum), where every second or so, there was a pulse of a slight stutter. This occurred with extreme precise regularity, so I wonder if it was perhaps some vsync issue on high-refresh displays. Mangohud's frametime monitor would remain completely flat except for those stutters.
Either way, the game is completely playable. It's probably the least enjoyable game in this series though.
This game works out of the box on vanilla Proton 9 these days, but I *highly* recommend the fixes described below.
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dobby,version=n,b" %command%
For the best experience, you're going to want to set up some of essential mods. Doing so can take a bit of tinkering, so just follow the steps described below:
- Run the game once first to set up the prefix correctly.
- Download MelonLoader.x64.zip HERE.
- Extract zip file contents straight into the top-level installation directory.
- Set WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dobby,version=n,b" in the launch properties of the game.
- Install .NET 6 with
protontricks 1413480 dotnetdesktop6(this installs both the x86 and x86_64 builds). This is required for MelonLoader to work for this game. - Run the game again. A Windows console will pop up, It will take a while to generate the IL2Cpp interop assemblies needed for the mods, be patient. Close the game again after it launches successfully.
- Download graphics config mod HERE, extract the .dll file into the “Mods” folder that now sits in your game installation folder. This mod allows the game to run on non-standards aspect ratios and at a framerate over 30.
- Run the game again. It will now automatically set the game’s frame rate to your monitor’s refresh rate. If you want to change it, edit the config file that’s now in the game’s install folder (NocturneGraphicsConfiguratorConfig.cfg), or just use
DXVK_FRAME_RATEto limit the frame rate. - Download the HD Audio mod HERE and follow the instructions included with the download (nothing Linux specific).
More Mods that I recommend:
- https://gamebanana.com/mods/393752 (Better font that looks like the PS2 game)
- https://gamebanana.com/wips/72800 (Amazing Minimap upgrade)
Didn't run quite as well as I was hoping for, but still great and multiplayer worked without a hitch!
The game doesn't perform quite as well as I was hoping it would be. Given my hardware I didn't really have any problems, but my brother (who I played this with) has similar but slightly weaker hardware but was able to run game at an almost consistent 120fps-ish range, whereas I was more along the 80-90fps range. I had to tweak the settings a bit here and there to fnd the sweet spot.
Multiplayer worked perfectly with my brother on Windows, though I should point out that he was always the host.
I had zero technical issues during the playthrough, and zero issues with multiplayer. I can't confirm if being a Linux host is problematic or not though.
Aside from some windowing quirks, the game runs just fine on recent versions of Proton.
- Alt-tabbing can be problematic, as sometimes the game was non-interactable after switching windows.
- This is likely an issue on Windows as well, but the game does not scale well on high resolution on ultrawide monitors. On high resolution screens the menu is absolutely tiny. The best way to play is to use
gamescope -f -w 1920 -h 1080 -- %command%IMO.
Most of these quirks likely stem from the game being a really bare-bones PC port to begin with. The game has no real options to speak of, so having tools like gamescope on Linux can actually be an advantage.
Note: I only played through Part 1 for this report.
gamescope -f -w 1920 -h 1080 -- %command%
See previous report.
See my previous report. Since then I have now completed Part 2 as well, and the game ran without significant problem during this playthrough as well.
Still far from perfect, but patch v1.01.03 brings welcome changes for Linux. It's not great but not terrible either.
Running the game in fullscreen still results in the overdraw issue.
The game is getting more playable on Linux, and I hope we'll see some of the changes in the latest patch ported over to the other games in the series. I'd give this something between a thumbs up and thumbs down right now.
Two issues have been largely resolved.
- You no longer need any manual fixes or Protontricks commands to fix the font issues. Everything works as intended out of the box.
- There is no longer any horrible slowdown when switching over to the supply view. It renders very smoothly now.
The biggest outstanding issue is still the way that graphics are drawn in fullscreen. When you open one of the game's menus or sub-menus, the graphics get drawn "on top" of the existing screen, but slightly shifted on the Y-axis. This makes mouse inputs also shifted on the Y-axis to the same degree.
There are two imperfect fixes for this:
- Run the game in Windowed mode. The downside is (obviously) that you have to run the game windowed, at a lower resolution than your monitor. Scrolling with the mouse is hard because of this.
- Use gamescope. A bordless fullscreen session using gamescope does not suffer from this issue. However, using gamescope breaks the functionality of the right-click context menu. While you don't need to use this menu all the time, it is occassionally necessary, so this is not a great solution.
Even with a bunch of fixes applied, this one just doesn't play well on Linux, and neither do the other games in the series.
As others have noted, you need at least the Segoe UI fonts to get things going. See below.
The game screen is shifted a fair amount to the bottm and a bar appears on top.
The game doesn't occupy the entire screen and overlaps itself.
Because the screen is shifted, mouse inputs are also shifted and thus are always off.
The game runs very sluggishly and occassionally hangs.
I've tried all sorts of fix to try to get this to become playable. In my final attempts, I did notice that using gamescope can get rid of the screen shifting problem. However, gamescope behaves problematically because certain screens open up as native GDI popups, and gamescope has issues hadling this. And even with gamescope, the game still runs very sluggishly.
It's a shame because all the games in the series are fun and accessible wargames. If only they would have used some more modern technology and weren't just built on native GDI.
Aside from some minor issues with the opening video, this plays flawlessly all the way through.
The game's opinion splash screens didn't display, so I switched over to Proton Experimental, which instantly fixed the issue. There was also a short cinematic scene between Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 which curiously enough did NOT play, even with Proton Experimental.
I expect this to run without issues on the Deck as well, however do take in mind that this game is completely mouse-driven so it's probably not the best candidate in that regard.
Runs great without any real issues.
For reasons unknown, I was not able to get Mangohud to work with this game.
Despite not being the most optimized game ever (as this is basically an Unreal Engine 4 game developed by a single guy), the game ran more than well enough. I encountered no stability issues and was able to run everything maxed out on 3440x1440 with a consistent framerate somwhere between 70-80 fps.
Works perfectly out of the box.
I occassionally had some issues when alt-tabbing where I had to alt-tab back into the game twice, but it's honestly barely worth mentioning.
Nothing of note to say here. Works exactly like you would expect under stock proton. I didn't try it on the Deck (since playing with the mouse is nicer), but would I expect it to work perfectly on the handheld as well.
Runs really well on Linux, but requires you apply a bunch of fixes first. Otherwise it's unpleasant to play.
fluidsynth -is -a pulseaudio ~/Music/Soundfonts/SystemShock_MusicAugmentationProject.sf2 & %command% ; pkill -9 "fluidsynth"
The Windows version of this game relies on Windows MIDI capabilities, so on Linux you have to provide your own. Fluidsynth will do just fine and is actually much more pleasant to use. See below for more info.
The mouse input is very unpleasant, but can be fixed by dropping a new version of SDL2 in the prefix. This is an issue on Windows as well. See below for more info.
Movement was very strange. After looking into it online, it appears movement is locked to 30 fps. This is essentially unplayable. However, you can downgrade the version to fix this. This is also an issue on Windows. See below for more info.
I did encounter a few crashes in the first half hour or so, but none afterwards.
As stated at the top, this requires some fixes in order to work properly. In order to get (IMO) the definitive experience, please note the following steps:
- Mouse input issues: Grab the latest Windows x64 .dll of SDL2 from Github: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases. Simply drop it right next to the game's .exe and overwrite the old one.
- No music playing: Grab the Soundfont listed here for enhanced music: https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=12023.0. Next, install Fluidsynth on your system. Then, change the launch options to:
fluidsynth -is -a pulseaudio ~/Music/Soundfonts/SystemShock_MusicAugmentationProject.sf2 & %command% ; pkill -9 "fluidsynth". If you happen to use ALSA instead, usefluidsynth -is -a alsa. - Movement capped at 30 fps: The game used to have movement at 60fps, but this was changed later on because it causes a bug with enemeny movement. The fps cap is way worse than whatever bug it causes, so just downgrade your version. Open the Steam console (google to find out how) and issue the following command:
download_depot 410710 410712 1653668208125100915. This will download that depot to~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamapps/content/app_410710/depot_410712. Copy thesekhmet_64.exefrom there and overwrite the one in~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SS1Ewith it. You now have fluid movement again and won't throw up when moving around Citadel Station! - Text does not match speech: Download the "Proper Text Mod" here: https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=802.0. Follow the instructions and drop the
propertextfolder in~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/410710/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/Nightdive Studios/System Shock EE/mods.
This should fix all the game's issues and give you the most pleasant experience. I also recommend you take a look at the game's keybindings and set some more sensible configuration, as it's a little weird by default. You probably also want to switch to the Vulkan renderer.
Works out of the box and should run even on a potato.
You should have zero technical issues this one. I completed the entire game on all three timelines pluss a bunch of extra content and found nothing to report in terms of stability of compatibility.
As you'd expect the game performs very well even on low-end hardware. The game previously had a requirement for a CPU that supported AVX, but that was patched out later. So even if you (somehow) are working with a CPU that's more than 10 years old, you should be able to run this.
I played this for 10-20 hours on my Deck as well, and the experience was expectedly very smooth there as well. Since this game has low system requirements, plays well at 30 or 40 fps and is primarily targetted at controller setups (even though I mostly played with mouse) this really is the perfect kind of game for your Deck.
You can easily lower the screen refresh rate or cap TDP to a lower value with this game without experiencing any issues.
With its low system requirements, out of the box controller layout and tolerance to being played on a lower refresh rate, this really is the perfect example of a game that is perfect to play on the Deck.
The native version is unfortunately problematic, but playing through vanilla Proton is rock solid.
The game crashed a couple of times when trying to take screenshots. After this I decided not to take more screenshots, and there were zero issues after that. I figured it might have been a Steam Overlay issue, but the overlay works just fine.
As stated above, I recommend you go with Proton for this one. Otherwise, you might want to be careful with taking screenshots. Another teeny-tiny issue I had (but is barely worth mentioning) was that the achievement notifications pop up seemingly twice sometimes.
The lack of a native version is a shame, but it works just fine under Proton.
Considering this is a game built in Godot and is fairly simple engine-wise, it probably would have been fairly easily to provide us with a native Linux version. That being said, I can't fault the developer too much since the experience under Proton is essentially impossible to distinguish from the native Windows version.
After 120 hours of gameplay I can say this amazing mod works well provided you use some tweaks.
MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dxgi,d3d1;ddraw=n,b" mangohud %command%
Without GD3D11, the game has issues with alt-tabbing and does not display the opening video in the correct aspect ratio.
The mouse sensitivity it very low. At max it was acceptable for me. If this does not work for you, try out https://github.com/SaiyansKing/GRawInput
Very infrequently the game can crash while saving, corrupting a save. Just make sure to alternate between save slots and you should be fine.
This game runs on an old engine from 2002 using DX7, and is extremely CPU intensive in some areas. The GD3D11 renderer can fix some of this, but you will be limited by single-core CPU performance. This is not a Linux issue, but an engine issue.
The game does crash occasionally. This happens on Windows as well. Save frequentlly, use 2/3 quicksave slots, make periodic hard saves, and do not enable the quicksave feature in the config file.
Here is my general outline of what you should do to enjoy the game. Many of these are not Linux-exclusive issues, but just the effects of this being a very old engine.
- In order to increase compatibility and performance, use https://github.com/SaiyansKing/GD3D11 (dont' forget your WINEDLLOVERRIDES). This also fixes the intro video and alt-tabbing issues.
- You can open the DX11 settings with F11. Make sure NOT to enable
Rain EffectsorHDR, as they completely ruin the game's style. - In the
Systemfolder, editSystemPack.ini, and setHideFocus = 1. This will disable looting bodies with nothing on them. Trust me, you want this. - Do NOT enable the quicksave functionality in
Gothic.ini. Create 2 or 3 manual quick save slotes in the first 2 or 3 save slots, and rotate between them. Make a hard save every few hours. Rotate out your hard saves when you run out of slots. I made approx 80 hard saves throughout my time playing. - The City of Archolos is extremely taxing on your CPU. This is an engine limitation. But there is a fix for it. Open the DX11 advanced menu by pressing Ctrl+F11. Then, enable the
Occlusion Cullingoption in theGeneralmenu. This relieves stress on the CPU so you should be able to get back to 60 fps again. This does introduce flickering, especially when shifting perspectives, but if you care about smoothness it's worth it. - You probably want to keep mangohud on hand at all times so you can take a peak in areas that cause a peek at it when performance degrades.
Remember: the vast majority of issues are NOT Linux-specific, so if you a fix online it will likely work just as well on Linux as on Windows.
Works really well using either renderer.
The game ships with both a DX11 and DX12 renderer. In my experience, both of these work fine, and I experienced no issues with either of them. I didn't do any detailed performance analysis between them, because the game performed well for me with DX12, and that's the one I did most of my playthrough with.
If you select the DX12 renderer, you have the option of enabling ray-tracing in the graphics menu. I'm not convinced this option works however, as I didn't immediately notice the effect. I think it's meant to provide ray-traced reflections, but it was hard to notice. I think this option does not actually work on Linux. From what I've read, people generally comment that this is a very performance-intensive option with little graphical gain, so I'd just leave it disabled either way.
I played through the entire game with mouse and keyboard (considering this is a real-time with pause game). The game accomodates this fairly well, but the cursor seemed to have a capped framerate or was software based, which gave it a ghosting effect when moving fast across the screen. This is rather annoying, but definitely not a deal breaker.
Works perfectly on Linux, but keep in mind the game isn't well optimized.
The game works out of the box with essentially zero issues.
Now, speaking of performance: on my desktop PC I was able to brute force the game with my powerful hardware on max settings. But on my laptop, which has a Radeon 6800M, I did have to lower the settings somewhat to give me a smooth experience. Thankfully, the game has a charming art style that looks good even when you have to tweak your settings somewhat.
One thing that did annoy me a little is that the game does not only sync save games, but it also syncs graphics settings across machines. So I had to re-tweak those settings every time I switched machines.
Works great out of the box, but I recommend applying some fixes to patch the very basic port.
MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" mangohud %command%
As noted, the game runs perfectly fine out of the box. However, this is actually a surprisingly poor port for such a lovingly crafted game. I recommend the following fixes/patches/mods:
- dgs_hackfix to enable high framerates and high resolutions. (Don't forget your
WINEDLLOVERRIDES) - Audio Restoration Mod to get the higher quality music from the 3DS release.
- PS4 Input Mod to get PS4 controller glyphs if you're using a DS4.
Using these patches and mods gave me an absolutely wonderful experience that I can wholeheartedly recommend to everyone, and this is probably a superb game to play on your Steam Deck as well.
Runs just fine out of the box!
Not much to say here. It's a short game that should run fine without any real issues. It probably isn't he most optimized game ever, but it ran without too many issues on my hardware. There were a couple of scenes that brought the game closer to about 60fps than 100fps, so I dropped the overal graphics quality from "Ultra" to "High" and that was it.
As expected, this game runs out of the box on Linux!
Like most of the other Trails games, this one feels like a native experience under Proton. I played this game before through the unofficial translation on Windows (which is what this version is based on). My experience on Linux with Proton was pretty much EXACTLY the same as my previous playthrough on Windows.
I imagine this game works very well on the Deck as well, though the fast-forward functionality might be a little more taxing there.
Aside from some small issues, this one works perfectly fine on Linux.
I could be wrong, but I get the feeling there's something wrong with the game's FXAA implementation. FXAA usually results in a slightly blurred effect, but here it produces a very distinct shimmering effect on objects in the background whenever the camera moves. You can switch to MSAA to remove this, but it is of course a lot more GPU intensive.
Furthermore, there is also a small issue concerning the water shader used in swimming pool scenes, where the shader effect bleeds into character model outlines when they stand in front of the swimming pool.
As others have noted, the game does not close properly. If you're using Steam, just close the game by closing it from the Steam client. That works without issues. Otherwise the game will hang.
Aside from the small issues noted above, you should take note of the performance here. The previous two Cold Steel games were initially developed for the PlayStation Vita, and as such, performed very well on PC (plus the fact that it received a rock-solid port). Cold Steel III and IV, however, have the PS4 as target platforms. As such, you should not expect the games to run on a potato like the previous two games did, despite not looking that much better.
I did not play this one on my Deck, but I expect it would be a fantastic game to play on it.
MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" mangohud %command%
Just like Cold Steel III, the game won't close properly if you exit from the main menu. Just close the game directly in the Steam client and it works just fine.
Any Cold Steel III report should more or less be the same as a Cold Steel IV report, as both games run on more or less the same engine. Aside from the issue of the game not closing, they function more or less perfectly.
As usual, you can use SenPatcher with this game. It doesn't have a whole lot of fixes for Cold Steel IV, but I used it nonetheless because it allows you to disable the game capturing your mouse movement, which I found to be a little annoying when using a controller. If you do, don't forget your WINEDLLOVERRIDES.
As expected, this one works perfectly out of the box with zero issues!
Despite the fact that this is a Godot game and The Case of the Golden having a native Linux version, this sequel only comes with a Windows and Mac version. This isn't really an issue, since the game runs flawlessly under Proton and runs on a potato.
Great sequel to a modern classic!
Works just fine, but do note the weird issue with the Linux version!
IMPORTANT: This game actually has a native Linux version, despite not being advertized on the Steam store or in the Steam client. If you check SteamDB, you'll notice that the game has a depot for a Linux version, and that is the one that will be installed if you install the game on Linux. I did some digging, and it seems like the developer just provided a basic Linux version (as this is a Unity based game), but did not have enough confidence in its ability to support that version to advertize official support. I lost about an hour of deep confusion to this.
If you want to use the Windows version, you need to force compatibility though the properties window. I ended up playing the Windows version through Proton because DXVK maintain the proper aspect ratio on an Ultrawide screen (for which this game does not have the proper support), while a native OpenGL application usually does not and I still haven't found a fix for this.
I did not really encounter any issues with either version.
%command% -fm
Vanilla Proton 9.0-3 runs this game out of the box with little to no issues. However, follow the steps below for the optimal experience.
NewDark/T2Fix
In order to get the best experience, you need NewDark, which is THE way to play Thief and Thief II these days. You can easily get NewDark together with other fixes via the T2Fix package. Get the "with mods" version, as it has a couple of extra fixes.
If you don't have ProtonTricks and Wine already installed, you can easily run the installer with the following command:
$ STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH="$HOME/.local/share/Steam" STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/211740 WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/211740/pfx/ ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton\ 9.0\ \(Beta\)/proton run ~/Downloads/T2Fix_1.27e_with_mods.exe
Point the installer to the following path: Z:\home\<$USER>\.local\share\Steam\steamapps\common\thief_2.
Next, select the following components to install:
- Common Script Modules
- Mods: Thief2 Fixed
- Mods: T2FMDML
On the next screen you should set the preset to "High", and you could also opt to install OpenAL Soft if you want (more on that later).
That's all you need. These are fixes only. Personally I would highly discourage you from installing anything else, including texture packs, HD mods, etc.
Fan Missions
For Fan Missions, I recommend you just stay with the default missions selector, fmsel. It comes out of the box and works mostly fine.
Here's my recommend setup. Create the following directory structure in ~/Games/:
T1FMs
├── Archive
└── Installed
T2FMs
├── Archive
└── Installed
Then, edit cam_mod.ini in the Thief 2 installation directory. Change the line with fmpath to
fm_path Z:\home\<$USER>\Games\T2FMs\Installed
Now, in Steam, set the launch options to
%command% -fm
The first time you run the game like this, fmsel will ask you if you want to pick an archive path. Say yes, and set it to Z:\home\<$USER>\Games\T2FMs\Archive.
You can now put all your FM archive files into the Archive directory, and fmsel will pick them up. You can rightclick and pick Install to set up the FM in the Installed directory.
Runs beautifully on Linux.
I noticed a very small issue with the yellow tinykin, who rendered incorrectly on the bottom side when used to form a bridge. Barely worth mentioning.
Aside from one teeny-tiny issue, this game ran like a dream on my machine. Everything worked out of the box, no tinkering needed, and performance was great. I imagine this is a great game to play on the Deck as well!
Typical EA App issues aside, this one ran flawlessly for me and performed really well.
Whether this game will work for you largely depends on whether you encounter any issues with the EA App. I didn't for this playthrough, and I booted into the game with zero issues. Everything worked out of the box and the game ran at a nice smooth 100fps (my monitor's refresh rate) all the way through. Mangohud seemed to show some minor frame pacing issues, but I honestly didn't notice anything at all while playing. Highly recommended!
I've played the native version of the game before, but it currently crashes instantly.
Before the game is even capable of getting to the launcher, it crashes and generates a dump file. I've played the native Linux version before, but I can no longer get it to work. This is an extremely rare example of a game I could not get to run on Linux.
The works fine and runs as expected under Proton, but performance on high resolutions is very poor to the point of not being enjoyable.
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display mangohud %command%
See below
I tested this game on two different Linux systems, as well as Windows sytem to compare performance. The results were very disappointing.
On my main workstation, which wields a might RX 7900 XTX (about as good a card as you can currently get on the market) and runs at 3440x1400, I cannot consistently get over 60fps in the battle benchmark without lowering all settings significantly. It mostly sits at 50fps and often dives into the 40s. The Immortal Empires campaign map is absolutely brutal, struggling to maintain 40fps, often dipping to 30fps.
On my laptop, which comes packed with an RX 6800M and runs at 1920x1080, I get much better performance with the same settings. The resolution makes a massive difference. I'm able to almost maintain 60fps in the battle benchmark, and between 50-60fps on the Immortal Empires campaign map. I frequently test games on both these systems, and this is one of the first times where my laptop delivers much better performance because of the resolution gap. Most of the time, games perform much worse, even at that lower resolution (which makes senes, as the 6800M and 7900 XTX are leagues apart).
My desktop still has a (dusty) Windows 10 installation that I boot up sometimes to compare performance. In all of the benchmarks, I get almost exactly and sometimes even over double the frame rate I get when using Proton. It's one of the largest perforance discrepancies I've seen for a game yet. It's the difference between "not pleasant to play" with Proton vs "very good" on Windows 10.
Total War games are notorious for being poorly optimized, but the comparison with Windows shows that there is a significant difference in performance, more so than with many other games.
WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=4:0,1,2,3 %command%
When running the game under Proton, you will most likely experience serious issues if you're running the game at high resolution and/or when you have a CPU with a high core/thread count. You can fix this issue (to a certain extent) with WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=4:0,1,2,3 %command%. This restricts Wine to seeing only 4 logical cores, which improves performance.
The NATIVE version actually crashed a few times for me, before I decided to switch to using Proton, which was a bit more stable.
- I tried running the native Linux version of the game first. I'm under the impression the developer spent a lot of time on this version, but I unfortunately experienced some crashed, so I switched over to Proton.
- Under Proton I had serious performance issues. Thankfully, a dxvk developer suggested I use
WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=4:0,1,2,3, and that helped a lot with performance on high-threadcount CPUs.
Basically I recommend you try both the native and Proton version of the game yourself. Which one will be best will depend on your system configuration. I'm fairly certain most people will find at least one of the two to be quite playable.
Both native and Proton version work fine, but I needed to run the Proton version because this game uses an ancient version of Unity.
WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=4:0,1,2,3 %command%
The game has major performance issues due to using an ancient version of Unity. Fixed with WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY See below.
You can make the game work perfectly, but it's in a bit of a weird spot. I think Obsidian didn't upgrade their version of Unity once since they started working on Pillars of Eternity and its toolset. The end result is that the game has some weird performance issues, that you can work around.
First off, despite being released in 2016, the Windows version only supports DirectX 9.0c. This is not a huge issue for this game, but it is rather stunning nonetheless. Second, this game version of Unity has huge performance issues. If you have a PC with a large amount of available threads (I have 12 cores and 24 threads), Unity's CPU scheduler will run into some serious issues and the game will have awful performance. This is simply fixed with WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=4:0,1,2,3, which will cause Unity to only see 4 cores, and schedule only across these 4. This fixes the performance issues, and this trick can be used in any game that has these older versions of Unity. I've used it in a lot of games.
You can probably perform the same trick for the Native version using taskset. The fact that you can do this in Wine/Proton with an environmental variable is rather nice though, and it's why I stuck with the Proton version.
Despite my pretty powerful hardware, the game just doesn't perform well enough for me to enjoy playing it.
I have one of the most powerful GPUs on the consumer market right now, and a fairly decent setup overall, but the game just performs terribly for me. Even when turning the settings to medium-ish and setting the FSR2 preset to "balanced", I can't get a consistent 60fps. This is unfortunately unacceptable to me, and I have decided to stop playing for now.
For the record, I asked someone with a Windows systems and fairly similar specs to check out the performance, and they seemed to have no issues whatsoever. I will probably come back to this one later down the line to see if things have improved.
This works just fine, both the native version and running under Proton.
The game's Proton version did occassionally crash. It wasn't a huge deal but it did happen a few times. I did not have this problem when running the game under Proton.
You can basically choose between either version of the game in my experience. Overall, I do think you might have a more stable version on Proton, but I recommend you play both version to get a feel for which one works best for you. Either way, I think you'll find that one of the versions will end up working out.
You might also just skip this title and jump straight into Ultimate General: Civil War instead.
Runs perfectly on the Steam Deck, and the flaws of this port (720p/30fps cap) are less of a problem on this device.
Very minor crackling/stuttering sound during the opening FMV
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=100 %command%
Using vanilla Proton, there's a rather small glitch. Whenever you take out a leader unit in this, you'll see a brief sequence where the an emblem is displayed over the corpse and subsequently shatters to indicate a leader has been taken out. This did not display for me on either vanilla Proton 7 or 8. Switching to experimental fixed it. No other graphical issues were found.
Some additional notes:
Aside from a tiny graphical issue, this game worked pretty much flawlessly for me out of the box.
The game only has frame-limiting options for 30/60/90/Unlimited, so I used
DXVK_FRAME_RATE=100on my 100Hz monitor, as this game me better frame pacing than the built-in vsync option.I noticed some people complaining about performance below, but I can only say I absolutely had no issues whatsoever wit this. With everything on max at 3440x1400, my RDNA2 PC sat comfortable at 150-200fps for most of the game whenever I turned off the frame limit. Some users seemed to link this to Nvidia cards, so I tested this on my RTX 2060 Mobile laptop, and I can confirm that with everthing on max at 1080p, I sat at 60-80 fps and never noticed any dips.
In other words, my experience is that this game performs exactly as you would expect it to: very well.
MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full,no_display WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=4:0,1,2,3 mangohud %command%
On my gaming desktop, performance was abysmal. Scenes where my FPS dropped into the low 30s occurred very frequently. This is likely an issue with older Unity builds on machines with high thread counts (24 in my case). The trick to fixing this is using WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=4:0,1,2,3. FPS was rock solid afterwards.
The only issue is what I've mentioned above. If you have a system with a lower thread count you likely won't experience this. For example, my laptop with 16 threads did not have the same issue and actually had better performance before I applied the fix.
The game works perfectly out of the box, zero adjustments are needed by the user to enjoy this game from start to finish.
Capped TDP at 8W and limited the refresh rate to 40Hz, which gives great battery life.
There are occasionally some UI elements that can be a little hard to read, though these instances are very rare.
A perfect game to play on the deck. Runs well, easy on the battery, you can save anywhere and gameplay works fine on lower framerates if you want to save on battery life.
Works perfectly out of the box.
Traditional hex and counter PC wargames can often be some of the trickiest games to get to run on Linux. Often times they run on ancient, rudemantary engines using things like raw GDI, etc. Well, Warplan is the perfect opposite of that. It uses Unity, and while Unity is of course far from perfect, is does mean it will be almost guaranteed to rune just fine on Llnux/Wine/Proton. The game runs smoothly, has a perfectly fine interface, and is just pleasant to play.
Aside from the intro video not playing properly, the game works flawlessly.
The opening video that plays before you reach the main menu is rendered in a choppy manner, and jumps back every few seconds. Just click to skip it, no big deal.
This is basically a Warhammer 40K game running on the Panzer Corps engine. I assume that means that Panzer Corps would also run without too many issues on Proton.
Despite this being a rather terrible report, the game works just fine, possibly even better than on Windows.
By default, the game has an issue with music not looping. This can be fixed by using the following "patch": https://archive.org/details/WotS3BGMloop
Leaving aside the many, many issues with this port, the game works fine on vanilla Proton these days. That means that unlike some of the reports below, everything including the video playback and sound work out of the box on Proton 9.
Based on what I've seen online, running this on Windows is quite problematic. I get the impression that you'll have a better time running it on Linux.
A great example of an indie game with a very solid native port!
The game seems to block the rendering thread sometimes when loading/generating terrain. This can make gnome-shell complain about the program being unresponsive. It's very minor as load times are mostly quite short.
No need for Proton here, the devs have given us a rock-solid Linux-native port that I had pretty much zero issues with. I haven't played all the different campaigns yet, but so far the game has been rock-solid. Kudos to the devs.
This older game had plenty of issues on Windows, but ran OOTB for me on Linux.
- The default brightness is lower than it should be by default. A little nudge to the brightness setting is needed.
- Towards the end of the game there were a few short moments with very minor graphical artifacts.
The mouse was a little jittery as first, but this was fixed by disabling "Use System Mouse" in the config tool.
On Windows, you need to use wrappers like dgVoodoo to get a stable framerate, and even then the game can act up a little, and I struggld to make it behave correctly on my ultrawide monitor. On Linux, it basically ran out of the box for me without any of those issues. Once you take care of a few very minor issues, it's smooth sailing.
Note: this game will pop out a progrom on the Wine system tray. This is normal.
This is a pretty bare-bones port, but it runs without any technical issues on Linux!
Don't expect this game to be much more than a port of the original PS3 game with support for higher resolutions and 60 fps. You're not really getting much more. Some of the performance issues were ironed out by QLOC after launch, but if you're still having issues, check out SilentPatch for Yakuza 3. I did not use the patch and can't vouch for how well it works on Linux.
Overall though, compatibility was pretty much perfect for me. No crashes or technical issues during 20 hours of playtime. My DS4 controller got picked up perfectly and the game mapped from keyboard to controller on the fly without issues. The only weird thing was that I had to press "Start" at the main menu even though it says "Press any button".
