Another exciting set of changes for Valve's new Steam Play system. This time the Proton beta 3.16-4 includes some really good stuff. If you don't see it show up, restart Steam.

Here's what's changed:

Proton now ships with corefonts support. This should fix many games with missing text, or that crash due to missing font support.

Significant Steamworks compatibility improvements. This should fix SOULCALIBUR VI's network failure when launched through Steam Play.

For Direct3D games (both DXVK and wined3d), Nvidia cards are now reported as if they are actually AMD cards. This prevents games from trying to load the Windows-only nvapi library and crashing or giving very bad performance.

Mouse focus and clipping improvements.

Upgrade OpenVR SDK support.

Fix for a keyboard input issue in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.

See the full changelog here, as a reminder the changelog moved from a file in the repo to GitHub's Wiki system.

It's really great to see the Steamworks fix which caused some issues for people. Hopefully there won't be too many hidden gotchas like that buried in it but only time will tell as more people try out Steam Play. I was also hoping Valve would do something about corefonts, since it was an issue in quite a number of games and a barrier for seamless play. For corefonts, they're not using the actual MSFT fonts, instead they're using liberation-fonts as seen from this commit.

As a reminder, Steam Play needs a driver version of 396.54 or newer at a minimum for NVIDIA and AMD ideally Mesa 18.2. For Transform Feedback support from DXVK you need the 396.54.09 Vulkan Beta Driver on NVIDIA and Mesa git for AMD, this fixes missing models in a bunch of DX11 games.

What I'm looking forward to now are Valve finding a way to deal with all those zero-byte updates and seeing how they advertise Steam Play on store pages. On top of that, what I'm also curious about is how Valve will move forwards with updates to their whitelist, it would be interesting if they had a way to notify you if a game on your wishlist gained "official" Steam Play support.

If you have issues with games not working correctly with Steam Play, do ensure you make a bug report on GitHub to help Valve and co improve the system.