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“Is Proton Good Enough?” - A Performance Comparison Between Gaming on Windows and Linux

2023; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-41456-5_48

1611-3349

Marek Kopel, Michał Bożek,

Digital Games and Media

In this paper a performance comparison of Proton - a Linux-based compatibility layer - and native Windows is carried out for the purpose of video gaming. Proton, being a fork project of Wine, is a compatibility layer and just as Wine allows to run Windows software in general on Linux - Proton is specialized to run Windows native games on Linux. Recently Proton gained traction because of being the platform used in Valve gaming console Steam Deck. So the ability to play Windows games is crucial for new owners of this Linux-based console, when their whole game library so far have been played only on Windows. With this study, through a more detailed analysis, we try to answer a general question, for this purpose, “Is Proton good enough?”.