I had to blink a few times at today's
news from Valve HQ. While we knew it was working on something special to
run Windows games on the Steam for Linux client, I didn't expect an
announcement this huge, and I didn't expect it so soon. Let's not draw
out the suspense. Here's a quote directly from Valve:
"Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be
installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with
native Steamworks and OpenVR support."
Valve just dropped what's arguably the biggest and most exciting news
to hit Linux in years, and that includes SteamOS and the (admittedly
failed) Steam Machines movement. This is a different animal. For folks
who've wanted to ditch Windows and cite gaming as their biggest reason not to, this could change a lot of minds. Let's get into the details.
For the past two years, Valve has been funding and working on
improving existing solutions for Linux that offer compatibility layers
for Windows games, such as WINE.
WINE, maintained by
CodeWeavers, is by far the most widely used tool
that allows most -- but not all -- Windows games and software to run on
Linux with varying degrees of success. But it's often tricky to get them
running smoothly, if at all, even with more elegant software front-ends
like Lutris.
Valve is seemingly taking the headaches out of the equation. No more
tinkering, no more dependency nightmares, no more guesswork. They've
developed their own libraries and a custom version of WINE called
Proton. It's open source,
meaning anyone can contribute to it and use their own versions within
Steam. All of this is being released inside a new Beta version of Steam
Play.
Fans of Vulkan, the "close to the metal" graphics API used in games like
DOOM,
will certainly love the next bit of news: Valve has also made
significant contributions to DXVK, and VKD3D, projects that essentially
convert DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 (respectively) API calls to Vulkan on
the fly. With the Steam Play update on Linux, all DX11 and DX12
implementations are now based on Vulkan. This means a dramatic
performance boost compared to OpenGL.
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