Years after the failure of Steam Machines, Valve is slowly but surely improving the state of Linux games. The company’s upcoming Steam Deck handheld computer runs on Linux, and its Proton compatibility layer allows it-and other computers-to also play Windows games.
Now, Valve has officially added support for NVIDIA’s DLSS machine learning upgrade technology for Proton, which may bring a substantial FPS increase and fewer screen flickers in games that support this technology.
Phoronix said in a report on Tom’s Hardware that Proton 6.3-8 is the first stable version to include support for DLSS, before the feature reached the experimental version in October, although it seems that you still need to set PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 and dxgi . nvapiHack = False to turn it on. DLSS will not appear on the AMD-driven Steam Deck because it requires a proprietary NVIDIA machine learning chip.
The new version of Proton also claims to support many other Windows games on Linux, including Death Cycle, Age of Empires 4, as well as Marvel’s Avengers and “Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.