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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, however after months of being "Linux only" (Manjaro KDE + Proton), just this weekend I broke and installed a Windows as a dual-boot option.

90% of games with Proton "just work" like you said. It is amazing.

But then there's that one game that doesn't work, or works but with half the fps... for me, it was Death Stranding. It runs at 60+ fps at 1440p on Windows, but runs at half that on Proton, with horrible artifacts/frametime on Linux + Proton (even the community mod "GloriousEggroll" Proton version).

If CyberPunk is any good, I'm going to buy it and want the best experience... for now, that probably means Windows, unless by some miracle it works on Proton with no issues.

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For me it was Fallout 4, the voice sounds don’t work on Ubuntu and it was a shame because I’m dying for that Elder Scrolls itch. After a decade and a half I’m just not using Windows, though, so I messaged Steam and they refunded me within an hour. That and Mass Effect are the only two games I’ve ran into trouble with which is a definite improvement over just five years ago.

If you're privileged enough you could buy another GPU, pass it through to a Windows VM, install looking-glass to pass display output over a shared memory buffer, barrier for mouse sharing and bam, you have Windows in a window in your Linux machine running close to bare metal performance. (It does eat memory bandwidth linearly with refresh rate though).

This won’t get passed anti cheats though.

I've heard of noone so far getting banned for playing in a VM. The anticheats can install their kernel modules as they want, and the lookingglass capture is using the direct X capture API, so nothing weird there. A SHMEM device is nothing out of the ordinary either.

I mean sure they could detect that you're running in a VM, but I'm yet to hear about any cheats where you edit the memory of a VM, so until that's a thing i safe.

There are companies like shadow.tech that builds their entire business around this implementation, so one can only hope it stays this way.

Personal experience: Playing both Overwatch and Counter Strike without any issue (VAC enabled servers)

You can do DMA from outside the VM into the VM. This is why most of the more serious anti cheats won’t allow it - vanguard, EAC, battleeye, EASA, ...

VAC and whatever Blizzard uses is enough for me, but thanks for the tip. I'll keep this In mind if Im ever to encounter either of these ACs

It will if you configure it correctly.

Nah, there are many ways to detect virtualization

I know you are wrong (as in I have not seen the detection not beaten, it's probably hypothetically possible in some edge case - at least for a while), so you can only be speculating about the "many ways".

I would think that Cyberpunk 2077 would have good Proton compatibility on day one. It runs on Stadia, which uses Vulkan.

There's been no word of Vulkan support in the public Windows build though, as far as we know it only uses DirectX 12

So they have Vulkan support because of stadia but won't release it publicly? That's kinda stupid

It wouldn't be the first time, there's a bunch of games on Stadia that have no public Linux build or Vulkan support in their Windows build

Maybe Google are licensing a proprietary DX->VK wrapper for Stadia developers to use, so they can't release it elsewhere?

Sometimes your Stadia build is done by another company, or is using some obscure Stadia_VK extension, or your renderer is statically linked, so you'd have to do another build to switch to VK. Whatever it is, it's probably just enough work, and DX11/DX12 works better enough anyways that there just isn't enough incentive to spend the effort to get your VK backend running on Windows.

> DX11/DX12 works better enough anyways

DX isn't performing better than Vulkan, is it? The performance of Vulkan titles has been almost absurdly good.

> Maybe Google are licensing a proprietary DX->VK wrapper for Stadia developers to use, so they can't release it elsewhere?

If they are using a wrapper it is probably just dxvk with extra stadia specific patches. ( https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk )

DXVK is for DirectX 11 and earlier, not for DirectX 12

It's entirely possible that the Stadia version is a separate version of the game contracted out to some other studio, with heavily invasive changes that would break if blindly rebased on top of the Win32 version.

I think people should start thinking of Stadia as "a console that happens to use the Linux kernel," not as a server running a Linux distro. It's getting the equivalent of a console port.

Cyberpunk only uses DirectX12 on Windows.

> If CyberPunk is any good, I'm going to buy it and want the best experience...

from past experience with CDPR games, you should really wait a good year for all the patches to happen. TW3 was only really playable, like, two years after release

This is true for nearly all AAA games now. They're buggy garbage when they come out.

After playing many Bethesda titles I think I can handle CDPR bugs. Skyrim and Fall out are about the buggiest games I’ve played and I never played on launch. Still fun to play.

Once Cyberpunk gets unlocked I might change my mind but for now I’m hopeful.

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