Congratulations to Valve, and especially CodeWeavers, who have tirelessly put forth the effort to make gaming on Linux and the Steam Deck easier and easier as the weeks and months go by. Proton 7.0-5 went from being a release candidate back in October, to Proton Next a month later, and now we’ve hit the stable release.

What’s changed since Proton Next? Well, nothing, really. All of the same games are playable. The same bug fixes are in as well. Just think of the stable release as being more, well, stable. You could check the GitHub thread for the RC and see whatever other issues got fixed.

As a reminder, the following games are now playable:

Fixes have been added for plenty of games, including Batman: Arkham City, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Return to Monkey Island, VRChat, CoD: Black Ops II, RDR2, Tekken 7, Armello, and plenty of others. HOTAS has been fixed with Elite Dangerous, and GTA V has an improved “situation with not loading textures.”

  • fix Batman: Arkham City GOTY launching in the background on Steam Deck when set to fullscreen
  • fix Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered displaying dialog about outdated drivers on AMD systems
  • fix Final Fantasy IV (3D Remake) having no audio
  • fix Return to Monkey Island not reacting to mouse clicks after a recent game update
  • fix upsidedown videos in VRChat and many other games
  • fix Call of Duty Black Ops II Zombies and Multiplayer hanging on exit
  • fix Bail or Jail crashing when opening the Terms of Serivce
  • fix Red Dead Redemption 2 crashing after a recent game update
  • fix Final Fantasy XIV Online launcher functionality after game update
  • fix cutscene stutter in Disgaea 5
  • fix Thrustmaster HOTAS having non-functional dial in Elite Dangerous
  • fix Planet Zoo randomly crashing
  • fix SCP: Secret Labratory not being playable after a recent game update (again)
  • fix Tekken 7 crashing at launch
  • fix Armello hanging on exit
  • fix Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization freezing after the tutorial
  • fix Space Engineers intro video not playing correctly
  • fix Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen videos not playing correctly
  • improve GTA V situation with not loading textures

Network video support was added for VRChat, and DXVK has been updated to 1.10.3-28-ge3daa699. Note that this release did not upgrade to the newer DXVK 2.0 since that requires newer GPU drivers; Proton 7.0 will continue to use DXVK 1.10.x until the next major release of Proton to maintain compatibility with older GPU drivers.

An update should be available in your Steam client. Simply update Proton (enable “Tools” in the list view in the top-left corner of your library to see it) and it should replace 7.0-4 with 7.0-5. Restart Steam and you should be all set. Note that Proton Next is no longer an available option, as it has been replaced with this stable release.

Proton 7.0-5 in Steam

See the patch notes on GitHub.

Cover image credit: People Can Fly/Gearbox