New Steam beta allows playing Windows games on Linux

Valve has announced an enhanced version of Steam Play, which is now available through a beta of the Steam client for Linux. Using a modified version of Wine, it is possible to play a growing selection of Windows games on Linux.

According to the announcement from Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais, the changes to Steam Play originally introduced in 2010 will allow Linux users to play Windows games that don’t have a separate Linux version. It works including support for Steamworks, OpenVR, fullscreen, controllers and enhanced multithreading.

DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are based on Vulkan, with Direct3D 11 and 12 compatibility provided by DXVK and vkd3d respectively. To make this possible, Valve has partnered with CodeWeavers to develop Proton, which is a modified version of Wine that allows Windows software to run on Linux systems. According to Griffais, Wine has also benefited from the work on Proton.

There are now 27 games that have been tested for compatibility, including various versions of Doom, Tekken 7, Star Wars: Battlefront II from 2005 and Quake. These can be played in the beta. More games should be added in the future, players can also play non-whitelisted games by using a setting in the Steam client. Operation is then not guaranteed, for example complex DRM or anti-cheat measures can cause problems. In the future, players should be able to vote for games to be nominated for whitelisting.

As for performance, Griffais said, “It’s to be expected that there will be a difference in performance for games that require graphics API translation, but there’s no fundamental reason a Vulkan title should run slower.” Developers could get the best performance by natively supporting Vulkan. While Proton supports macOS, there are currently no plans to run the revamped version of Steam Play on that platform. Players who want to try the beta can sign up for it and then follow the necessary instructions.