I’m considering prioritizing buying GOG games when available, because they’re DRM-free, especially now that there’s a partner link through Heroic to show where my purchase is coming from. But a thought just occurred that those Windows-encoded videos were a problem on Steam until Valve started re-encoding those videos in other codecs on their servers. To my knowledge, there’s no legal way to distribute Proton with those codecs. Will I run into video playback problems on GOG games run via Proton? How has your experience been with that sort of thing?
Separately, I also remember Vulkan shader compilation being a problem, but it sounds like it’s less of an issue on modern versions of DXVK. Still, I’d be interested in hearing if stuttering problems for those things have been resolved as well, in your own experience.
Valve can’t distribute the codecs legally, but the community sort of can. VLC for example can get away with it because France doesn’t recognize software patents and in general has pretty good interoperability laws. So the codecs exist in open-source form that you can compile yourself. I think Proton-GE does bundle them, and if not I’m sure someone did or at least have instructions to compile with the codecs. We’ve dealt with wmv files in games well before Proton even existed, well before Valve even supported Linux at all.
For the shaders, it’s a normal and one-time thing. Once they’ve been compiled once they’re cached, and then afterwards it doesn’t need to recompile them and you don’t get stutters. What Valve does there is they collect the compiled shaders and distribute them to everyone so it’s faster. So it’ll be a stuttery mess for a couple minutes and it’ll progressively get smoother and smoother as new shaders will become rarer and rarer until they’ve all been seen once.
Right, I’m familiar with what performance looks like when the shaders aren’t compiled, but is it still the very visible and tangible issue that it was back when Proton first came out, when playing a game through Heroic/GOG? If so, do modern enough games relieve the issue by having the shader compilation step within the game itself?
And as for the distribution of those codecs, does Heroic handle that automatically? Or if I have a version of Proton-GE, does it know to use that version when applicable?