Suggestion: Force WineD3D on all games

[Crashed]

My laptop is not compatible with Vulkan, but due to the Mesa version running on it Proton tries to use DXVK, leading to poor performance.
Rather than having to change the command line on all Win32 games, consider allowing a global option to force WineD3D.

[Bloo Alien]

While I personally do not share your problem that I know of yet (at least not on my current tower machine, I do also have a laptop that I have not used in a while), I too would love to see such an option added (as long as the sensible default setting was obviously set to what the most people would obviously benefit from), similar to how I can choose optionally to force a particular version of Proton for all games where it's not explicitly specified. Having this sort of global option for these features can be absolutely convenient when configuring older or unusual systems for best compatibility with Steam and it's games. Just more options in general would be nice to have (such as an option to completely disable those evil little Steam popup notifications entirely while playing games, such as the "achievement" notices for example). Perhaps add an "Advanced Options" tab in the preferences window, specifically for such additional "tweaks" to be easily found and configured? Maybe with a big scary warning at the top to shy away any folk who don't actually need/want such options?

[Aoi Blue]

It would be nice to have a GUI option to set preferred rendering method for all games. (Vulkan or OpenGL). It would be nice if they even implemented a universal way for native games to be told by Steam to prefer OpenGL or Vulkan on a system, provided they are capable of Vulkan.

As of your situation you may want to try forcing your Vulkan renderer to the VN software renderer, and make sure your Vulkan libraries are up to date so you have the latest VN emulation layer. This may actually be faster than WineD3D.

There is a way to set the option per proton version. If you go to the Proton github page it outlines the config file to put system-wide tweaks. Any game-specific tweaks you enable will override these.

Proton Github (link to Runtime Config Options section):
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton#runtime-config-options

[Aoi Blue]

Originally posted by Bloo Alien:

Perhaps add an "Advanced Options" tab in the preferences window, specifically for such additional "tweaks" to be easily found and configured? Maybe with a big scary warning at the top to shy away any folk who don't actually need/want such options?

Knowing most users simply hiding it behind "Advanced options" should be enough.

Adding a warning of "Will reduce performance on Vulkan capable systems" on the "Force OpenGL-Based WineD3D in Proton" option might be good.

Similar warnings should be added to other options that are compatibility tweaks that reduce performance, like disabling FSync system-wide for people with kernels with early buggy versions of the Futex patch or enabling advanced logging.

[Marlock]

100% agreed that there should be easier configs for this sort of thing

meanwhile, this is how to force it for each game:

"PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%"

and this is how to pass the same parameters to all games:

The best way to set these environment overrides for all games is by renaming user_settings.sample.py to user_settings.py and modifying it appropriately. This file is located in the Proton installation directory in your Steam library (often ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Proton #.#).

source:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1636417404917541481/

[Bloo Alien]

Hey, thanks very much for the workarounds, guys! I had not yet found those in any documentation or web searches for previous things I wanted to tweak, so these will make an excellent addition to my notes / bookmarks. Awfully useful until such "Advanced Options" do become available in the GUI settings panel (sometime next millenium I suspect - right after the release of Portal 3 and Half-Life 3). ;)

[Aoi Blue]

Originally posted by catbox:

you can edit the proton file
steamapps/common/proton
user_settings.sample.py
rename to
user_settings.py

add
"PROTON_USE_WINED3D": "1",
to the bottom
now all games using proton are forced to use wined3d

Yes, this is what was in the page I linked. I linked to the page because there was additional related info there, and I like to teach people to help themselves and encourage them to learn more when given the opportunity.