GloriousEggroll has released GE-Proton 10.10, a heavily breathed-upon version of Valve's version of Wine used with Steam, and the big news is that it supports NTSYNC by default on supported platforms. That means amd64 systems whose kernel is built with the CONFIG_NTSYNC option, available in the 6.14 series or later or for 6.12 or 6.13 as a patch.
NTSYNC is support for certain fine-grained Windows NT scheduling primitives for Linux, the use of which improves performance and compatibility for Windows programs. Maximum performance gains range from modest to dramatic, with most programs falling towards the lower end of the spectrum, but it can substantially improve minimum frame rates for some titles.
You can observe that ntsync is being used from the console output, e.g. using tail -f ~/.steam/steam/logs/console-linux.txt
. You will see messages like wineserver: NTSync up and running!
If you're on a Debian system, see my instructions for building kernel packages if your distribution doesn't provide a compatible kernel, and you want to jump in and get started. I've just built kernel 6.15.8 with NTSYNC as a module (CONFIG_NTSYNC=m
in the kernel config) and can confirm it's working on Devuan testing (Excalibur.)
You can easily install GE-Proton 10.10 with ProtonUp-Qt (or by simply unpacking the archive in ~/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d/
and restarting steam.)