Years after its failed Steam Machines, Valve is slowly but surely improving the state of Linux gaming. The company’s upcoming Steam Deck handheld runs atop Linux, and its Proton compatibility layer lets it — and other computers — play Windows games as well. Now, Valve has officially added support for Nvidia’s DLSS machine learning temporal upscaling technique to Proton, potentially bringing big FPS boosts and less flicker in games that support the technology.
As Phoronix reports (via Tom’s Hardware), Proton 6.3-8 is the first stable release to include support for DLSS, after the feature previously hit experimental builds in October, though it appears you’ll still need to set PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 and dxgi.nvapiHack = False to turn it on. DLSS won’t come to the AMD-powered Steam Deck, of course, since it requires proprietary Nvidia machine learning silicon, but we recently learned the Steam Deck will support AMD’s arguably much less capable FSR.
The new version of Proton also claims to enable support for a host of additional Windows games on Linux in general, including the celebrated Deathloop, Age of Empires 4, and both Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Mass Effect Legendary Edition (though apparently those last two have limitations that are still being worked out).
And, Valve says 6.3-8 is the release that includes “support for an initial set of BattlEye games,” referring to the BattlEye anti-cheat software that may or may not be holding back some of the most popular Steam games from having proper working multiplayer on the Steam Deck and Linux in general. (Ball’s in definitely in the developers’ court.)
You can find the full changelog here at Valve’s GitHub. Nvidia originally announced it would work with Valve to bring DLSS to Linux back in June.
