NTSYNC for Proton / Wine now in Linux kernel 6.14 that "Should make many SteamOS users happy"

Thanks for the info. I don’t know a ton about them but I’m honestly massively impressed at the talent of the Proton devs. The fact that they have made most games run as well and some games run better on Unix operating systems through a translation layer than on Windows (the OS they were designed for) is ridiculously impressive. And this just shows they aren’t resting on their laurels but are being proactive in preventing issues before they happen which is immensely commendable and impressive.

honestly i kinda like that approach, the devs don't want shit code in the main codebase, but hey they can fart it out in a week so might as well provide it to those who want to use it anyways!

To give more detail: Proton uses a hacky workaround called fsync. Fsync was developed by the Wine developers but was explicitly not merged into Wine because, by their own admission, this is a really hacky workaround and it's definitely not the right way of doing things.

For games, using fsync is far better than not using anything, and so Proton uses fsync. Apparently there's recently been concern that the fsync workaround is going to become a bottleneck in modern games (not entirely sure the reasoning why), and so the Wine developers pushed for the development of NTsync, which is basically fsync if it weren't a hacky workaround. NTsync alleviates the bottleneck that fsync creates, making it more robust, less hacky, and more futureproof.

In short, don't expect any noticeable performance increases, but Proton might work more consistently and it might improve performance for future games

Thanks for the context. I figured I must be missing something since performance increases like this for proton would be huge news and likely not possible.

Those increases are only for running games through wine. If you're running your windows games through proton (which is the default for the deck) you'll see a minimal performance increase, if any. It should improve compatibility for games though.

Anyone have more context on this? These are some pretty massive increases if the games in the table are in any way representative of all games.