It’s not one big optimization, it’s a product of Id actually having some of the best UE developers on the planet being able to tweak the engine to run like a beast. Each level is crafted from the ground up to allow for some sweeping optimizations revolving around actor loading and culling, and the game uses proper light baking to allow raytracing to handle marginal calculations instead of explicit path tracing every shadow. It’s a lot of little things that all take impressive amounts of skill and management to pull off effectively, a lot of this stuff is implemented poorly in other games and it show

Edit: Id has their own engine, I always confuse quake/doom and UE. Still though, Id has always built games that were well optimized. Look at some of the systems they managed to port quake to. I was wrong about the engine, but not about the talent in the studio.s.

My wife plays it. She’s on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (so I’d expect it to work on Mint too), installed it through Bottles, and it just worked. I’m on Kubuntu 25.10 and I’ve had it running but haven’t actually played it.

Problem is even when they do, they don’t maintain support. Borderlands 2 has a native port but it hasn’t been updated while the windows version had received new content and patches in the years since.

As far as I know, Microsoft has no patents related to linux and how it can run Windows games. Everything has been reimplemented from scratch on the linux side, there’s no shared IP or patented techniques being used.

I’m not sure if they really have standing for that.

But even if they did, Microsoft don’t have the guts because cracking down it would be akin to a direct attack on Valve and Steam. And at this point I think we can all agree that Microsoft needs Steam more than Valve needs Windows.

They likely have patents on a number of things implemented in Wine/Proton. Clean-room implementation is also good, buy would cover copyright, not patent.

It’s still happening in some cases. Like Balder’s Gate 3 getting a recent Linux port, for example.

Right, they clearly don’t believe it has been worth the effort in the past. At a certain point I’ve always worried that they might.

What patents?

I don’t have a list. Just considering that MS patents EVERYTHING I have a tough time believing they don’t have patents over at least SOME DirectX things that Wine has created an implementation for, etc.

WINE doesn’t need to implement anything that DirectX does, it just needs to translate those calls into the equivalent Linux ones. Linux does all the actual work; and if Microsoft had a patent for “drawing pixels on a screen” they’d have shown that hand by now.

WINE stands for “WINE Is Not an Emulator”; they’re not reimplementing Microsoft libraries. No patents to violate.

Didn’t they just announce this? Or are they still deciding on the “how” and not the “if”?

Sure, but patents cover methods and implementations. If Wine gets a cleanroom spec that says “when you put in these values, we need these pixels out” then they are free to write their own implementation not covered by the patent.

To Windows people wondering:

JUST DO THE JUMP. Installing Bazzite only needs a 16GB flash drive and 15 minutes of time, and you’ll be SHOCKED how smooth everything goes compared to Windows bloat.

And you don’t even need to give up on Windows! You can keep it on dual boot until you realize you didn’t touched Windows even once over the last 6 months.

That’s not how it works, but ok

Really the only factors in software are kernel and compatibility layer. Everything else is not a huge factor in Linux; this is mostly akin to saying “we need to test games with every different windows app running in the background”.

Of course for individual machines there will be external factors that users themselves need to consider (like don’t be doing Blender renders in the background lol) but there should be a huge difference between distros.

Perhaps custom desktop managers should be tested along with KDE and GNOME, but I’m honestly not sure much even those factor in.

2003

I was looking into this, it’s weird that it isn’t on ProtonDB

Future Linux Converts:

If you wonder “Will the game that I play work on Linux?”, there’s a website for that:

(www.protondb.com)

And Vermintide 2, using EAC, just ticked the box to not being hostile towards Linux, and it just works now. Hated Denuvo works too. There’s now a minority of games that don’t play ball with penguins.