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:
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Make games run smoother, removing microstutters and improving frame pacing
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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.
Is this in cachyos?
Ahh it was added last year, I just switched this week. https://www.phoronix.com/news/CachyOS-March-2025-Release
Oh nice! I was thinking this will improve my Linux gaming even more, but it’s already used :)
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!
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.
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.