Michiel de Ruyter
Published
Pretty much the same with Proton on Linux as on Windows, except for the usual 5-10% lower FPS.
This game is unplayable if you play it natively. Horrible stutter, the action feels bad. I have put over 200 hours in this game, both on Windows and on Linux. I can't play this game natively because of the stutter, the low and irregular FPS and the input lag for the mouse. With Proton however this game is perfectly fine, no problem at all.
Natively the game crashes fast and it crashes a lot. With Proton it does not.
Despite two problems the game can be played without any problems for hours consecutively.
Some very mild stutter because of loading of assets when you sprint into a new area, it only lasts for a small fraction of a second and after those assets were loaded it was perfectly fine. I don't know if the game itself causes that, also on Windows, I only played this game on Linux.
This game has two rather strange problems which don't ruin the playability much but you need to be aware of it.
- After leaving the upgrade-screen the FPS drops to 30-40% of the usual, this is fixed by simply either not leaving the upgrade-screen directly or opening another screen like maps or missions after you left the upgrade-screen.
- For whatever reason occasionally the game gets stuck at loading the saved game. I read reports from others who experienced the same problem, they claimed that they solved the problem by disabling cores (4 if they have 8, 2 if they have six). This does not happen frequently but it does happen every few hours.
FPS dropping after leaving the upgrade-screen, solved by loading any other screen.
At least for AMD (it might be different for NVidia) the Linux native version is utterly broken, it is a mess. This mostly is because this game uses OpenGL and not dxvk, AMD never optimized its drivers well for OpenGL and that is noticeable. For example, in the second part of Prague (after you take the train for the first time) the FPS drops to the low 50's with overall (for example I always set the textures on ultra, there is no performance penalty for that in pretty much every game) just high settings, even if I disable or turn down the most demanding ones (like lighting and shadows) to medium the FPS remains the same in such areas. That is unacceptable for a game from 2016 which runs on a 3700X and a 5700XT!
With Proton it works a lot better. The main thing to pay attention to is which vulkan-driver is being used by Steam. Most gamers who use Arch (probably also for other distributions) have at least RADV and AMDVLK installd, Steam will always use AMDVLK. It is highly recommend for this game to make Steam use RADV by setting the environment variable for that. With AMDVLK this game is kind of broken for Proton because of stutter and rather irregular framerendertimes (spikes). With RADV it works a lot better. You could also try out vulkan-amdgpu-pro, I have this driver installed but I did not try it out yet.
