Wine 11 is the biggest jump for Linux gaming in years.

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:

  • Make games run smoother, removing microstutters and improving frame pacing

  • 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.