Valve fixes up The Finals and No Man's Sky VR with Proton Experimental
Valve fixes up The Finals and No Man's Sky VR with Proton Experimental
www.gamingonlinux.com
Valve fixes up The Finals and No Man's Sky VR with Proton Experimental
10 comments
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Cool! What's VR on Linux like generally? I'd like to get a headset again, but not if it means going back to Windows
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Random broken things and weird tinkering to get some things working. And even when they work, not quite as good as windows.
Most overlays don't work because they are tied to windows specific windows capture things. On KDE wayland, the default "view desktop" from SteamVR doesnt even work.
But if youre looking for some very chill things, it's generally passable. I've been playing beat saber, which is fast paced (at least for the hand tracking) and proton handles it perfectly. From what I can tell, proton can handle VR games just fine, there's just some work to clean up the SteamVR interface in general.
I'm still delusionally hoping that the Valve Deckard is shipping soon and that when that drops, there will be a big SteamVR 3 linux update (kinda like how SteamOS 3 came out with the steam deck), and the headset will run linux itself so naturally they will have to ship all their linux VR improvements, and we'll see linux VR suddenly become mega viable.
tl;dr - working, depending on your level of tolerance for slight jank, and what games you want to play.
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It's minimally functional, I'm dual booting for vr. It felt like there was a frame of tracking lag which got me motion sick in a static scene. I found a forum post suggesting it was a vsync timing delay that steamvr normally accounts for, but you can workaround by playing with numbers in a configuration file. I gave up there, but I ran into some other issues too.
- Motion smoothing is not supported
- It doesn't automatically switch audio output
- Base station sleep mode doesn't work
- Performance was generally worse than windows, pistol whip had regular frame spikes
I've got the gen 1 vive and a 1070, so other headsets or better gpu driver compatibility could fix that.
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I have a separate PC for VR (with an old Vega64 in it) on my valve index. Just a week or two ago I got fed up with something on Windows 10 (i think it was trying to get me to upgrade to windows 11 maybe?) and installed bazzite.
I started with HORRIBLE performance issues. Like could barely run beat saber smoothly issues. And then I changed something minor around (Disabling the VR Home was I think the biggest thing, it's like it was constantly running in the background or something), and ran some script i found online (https://gist.github.com/galister/a85135f4a3aca5208ba4091069ab2222 - i think it was this one, but disclaimer, i have not looked deeply at what this does, I was running this on a fresh gaming only distro so I had nothing to lose), and suddenly performance was just fine. I'm sure this isn't motion smoothing, but going from stuttery to smooth made me think of this. And a Vega64 is pretty old, and pre-dates any modern "rdna" AMD improvements. But it is GCN at least. I might
Audio switching on Bazzite does work. In fact it works more reliably than it did on windows for me. I feel like "using a gaming dedicated distro" can go a long way in making gaming things work, and this is a dedicated gaming PC. YMMV
Base station auto sleep mode does not work, but https://github.com/ShayBox/Lighthouse this CLI script can solve that. Just set something to run
lighthouse --state onandlighthouse --state standbyand you're good.Performance is generally worse than windows, and some things won't work (OVR toolkit requires some windows specific things, so naturally doesnt work). But on windows, the first time i launch steamvr for any session (its not just per boot, its just more like "if the headset has been off for more than an hour"), the headset screen wouldnt turn on. Put the headset on, i can see the tracking is working via the mirroring on the display, but the headset doesnt light up. "Restart headset" and then it works. Every time. Doesn't happen on linux. And with bazzite, the power button does a quick sleep just like on a steam deck, and the index still works reliably after the computer wakes from sleep.
I don't do a lot of VR, i just regularly play beat saber for exercise. And it works well for that. I'm perfectly happy sticking with bazzite for VR workouts. I havent really tried any other games, but would be willing to test drive anything for compatibility if anyone cares about something specific.
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I too would like to know!
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The other posters seem to have bad experiences, so I'll chip in with my more positive report @Kraiden@kbin.earth. TBH I was expecting VR not to work all that well, but I was keen to try so I bought a second-hand HTC Vive, the very first model. Picked one up for €280 on ebay, which is a typical price or was two years ago.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well most VR titles work. TBH I pretty much only play VR now. I always check ProtonDB before buying any game, which is a good idea in general but especially so for VR. The VR games I play most are Elite: Dangerous, Skyrim, Dirt Rally 2, Half Life 2 (a free VR mod is available on Steam), IL2 Sturmovik (a WWII flight sim) and Pistol Whip. VRChat works great as well. I've got a little way into HalfLife Alyx, but put it down because reloading guns in the dark is too much to handle whilst simultaneously being attacked by zombies with headcrabs. That's not a Linux issue, just me struggling to remember the reload process under pressure. I have played a fair bit of No Man's Sky, but performance is pretty awful. I'll be trying it again after reading this news about improved support for it, but I'm not expecting much TBH as VR apparently has poor performance under Windows too. I've got about 5 or 6 other VR games which all work fine but just don't grab me.
I can't think of any games that have issues - only thing I can think of is the free VR Labs "game" made by Valve, which has an "Item Shop" zone which has never worked. Every other part of it works perfectly though.
Of course, the OG Vive is definitely showing its age, with a very noticeable screen-door effect - it's like playing games in really low resolution. So I will probably upgrade soon - there have been rumours about a new headset from Valve - the Deckard - if that does make an appearance it might be my cue to reach for the wallet, because the other well-supported headset is the Valve Index, which is getting kinda old now (it'd still be a lot better than my Vive of course). Well, actually there is also the gen 1 Vive Pro.
No other headsets have native support in Linux - you have to mess around with Monado or ALVR - this may well be why the other posters have had poor experiences. To reiterate, your best bets for VR on Linux are the OG HTC Vive, the gen 1 Vive Pro or the Valve Index.
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Can't imagine Finals in VR, that has to be motion sickness galore
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AFAIK The Finals doesn't have VR. Think they strictly meant VR support only for No Man's Sky.
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That makes much more sense :D
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