Source is this video:
Windows Was The Problem All Along - Dave2D
We could obviously compare performance between windows and steamOS before on the steam deck, or between windows and Bazzite on other handhelds. But this is the first time we have had official windows and SteamOS builds for the same hardware.
I think it’s what Valve has branded their fork of Wine. It translates win32 calls to Linux ones, and DirectX to Vulkan. Probably some other stuff too idk
Proton is Wine plus DXVK and VKD3D, as well as a big pile of little tweaks and out of tree changes that Valve maintains to specifically maximize game compatibility and performance.
It sounds a lot like what the GPU driver providers used to do (and probably still do, despite all DX12 and Vulkan’s promises of making that unnecessary) on top of making the drivers.
And that is basically “fixing badly written games so they perform well on the hardware”.
As far as I can tell, Intel has been using
Proton’s fixesDXVK to get their drivers working on older games on WindowsDXVK is not “Proton’s fixes”. It exists as a separate entity whose development Valve has helped fund and who Valve devs have directly contributed to.
Proton’s fixes are out-of-tree tweaks to DXVK, Wine and VKD3D that, put together, make games work much more seamlessly and smoothly than they otherwise would.