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Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at the kernel level, and the speed gains are massive (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [M] to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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Wine is the windows compatibility layer that Proton is based on, which is how the Deck plays windows games. So any significant update to wine will directly benefit windows games on Deck, as soon as Proton is updated.

NTsync is the headlining new addition to Wine11. It replaces Esync and Fsync as a much accurate synchronizer. This should:

  • Make games run smoother, removing microstutters and improving frame pacing

  • Significantly improve performance in some older games that could run into major performance bottlenecks from this. You can see some fps increases here, with many of the affected games getting over twice the fps.

NTsync requires kernel support, but Valve added that in steamOS 3.7.20. Wine11's NTsync hasn't made it into Proton experimental yet, but GE-Proton has added support for it already, so it's not hard to try it out.

Wine11 also improves support for older 32 and 16 bit windows applications.

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[–] 55 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I read this initially as windows 11 and was super lost.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I did too, at first I saw “W… 11” and thought Windows, then had to reread it and read “Win… 11” and it still didn’t make sense and finally had to tell my brain to slow the fuck down and fully read it to see that it said “Wine 11”

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    • [–] 30 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    From the email;

    The gain in performance varies wildly depending on the application in question and the user's hardware. For some games NT synchronization is not a bottleneck and no change can be observed, but for others frame rate improvements of 50 to 150 percent are not atypical. The following table lists frame rate measurements from a variety of games on a variety of hardware, taken by users Dmitry Skvortsov, FuzzyQuils, OnMars, and myself:

    Game Upstream ntsync Improvement
    Anger Foot 69 99 43%
    Call of Juarez 99.8 224.1 125%
    Dirt 3 110.6 860.7 678%
    Forza Horizon 108 160 48%
    Lara Croft: Temple of Osiris 141 326 131%
    Metro 2033 164.4 199.2 21%
    Resident Evil 2 26 77 196%
    The Crew 26 51 96%
    Tiny Tina's Wonderlands 130 360 177%
    Total War Saga: Troy 109 146 35%

    The whole thing is worth a read to see how this works, but jumps from 110 fps to 860 fps is just insane. The wine team has done some really great shit with this.

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    An important note is that this is compared to base wine, not Proton with Esync/Fsync.

    There may have still been significant gains, since those were some of the games worst affected by the lack of proper sync, but someone would need to run more benchmarks to find out.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Yeah. This whole results thing isn't really a well-structered article like you might get from a real journalist, so much as a quick and dirty comparison for examples sake in a software update push.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    Please fox fix that terrible formatting :p
    Edit: as context, op's original post had formatting that was all over the place haha

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    • [–] 21 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Is this in cachyos?

    Ahh it was added last year, I just switched this week. https://www.phoronix.com/news/CachyOS-March-2025-Release

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Oh, that's cool! I just switched from Windows to CachyOS a few weeks ago. It started out as an experiment to see how usable it would be, since I've always run into issues with nvidia drivers in the past. I kept Windows as a boot option, but I literally haven't booted it in 3 weeks now. Everything just works, and works really well!

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I did see some talk about uses being hesitant as this was a very new thing that the OS was adding as a default but seems to have worked out.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    For sure. I've tried to use various Linux distros as a daily driver several times in the past. But when it came to gaming, I would always run into hardware compatibility issues. Eventually, I would give up since gaming is my most frequent use for my desktop PC. But this time has been incredibly trouble-free. I think the only significant issue I've run into is that I had to manually build the xone driver to get my wireless xbox controller dongle to work.

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    • [–] 14 points 5 months ago

    It feels like a lifetime ago when everyone was talking about NTsync, glad it's finally here for Wine as well.

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    [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    When is this coming to SteamOS/Proton non beta?

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    • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Wait, werent they akready at par?

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