Games are now running quite stable on the Steam Deck thanks to Proton. However, many improvements in the background come from a single developer. She has been working for years on the Wine interface, which many Windows programs use under Linux.
Anyone wanting to play games on the Steam Deck or under Linux often has to use tools like Wine to get the games to work at all. Many titles are still not natively usable under Linux and require assistance.
The Steam Deck typically uses Proton, which is based on Wine and developed by Codeweavers in cooperation with Valve. However, it is thanks to one developer that you have massive performance gains under Proton that would not have been possible before.
Developer builds important interfaces for Wine that massively improve performance
Who is it exactly? Elizabeth Figura is a developer at Codeweavers who has been working on Wine for a while. She developed two important interfaces, ESYNC and FSYNC, which helped Wine and Proton achieve enormous performance improvements. Anyone playing on the Steam Deck via Steam Play automatically uses ESYNC.
Figura has invested a lot of time in the successor to both interfaces in recent years, reports the magazine XDA-Developers. NTSYNC has officially been released after many revisions. The advantage is: NTSYNC will be integrated directly into the Linux kernel, which in turn means an additional performance boost.
both methods to improve the performance of Windows games and applications on Linux using Wine. They address the bottleneck that occurs when Wine tries to translate the complex Windows synchronization methods to the Linux system.
What change is coming to Proton now? NTSYNC is now officially integrated in Wine version 11 and will also come to Proton later.
Valve has already integrated the NTSYNC kernel driver into the SteamOS 3.7.20 Beta, where the module is loaded by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, has already activated it.
How much does performance increase? The improvements are not to be underestimated: In benchmarks by developers on lwn.net, Ntsync is compared with the normal version of Wine. Depending on the game, FPS increases significantly. In developer benchmarks, the frame rate for “Dirt 3” rose from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, reports the magazine XDA-Developers. Additionally, Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 is now said to be playable under Linux.
If you don’t want to play on the Steam Deck and are looking for another handheld: MeinMMO presents the most exciting alternatives you can still buy. You can read more about this directly on MeinMMO: Steam Deck: Here are the 10 most exciting alternatives that you can buy
