What you need to know
- NVIDIA and Valve worked together to bring DLSS support for Steam games to Linux.
- DLSS support comes through Steam Proton, an open-source tool that lets people play Windows games on Linux.
- Support for DLSS on Linux will arrive this fall..
Linux gamers just received a big boost, thanks to the latest announcement from NVIDIA. At Computex 2021, NVIDIA announced that it partnered with Valve to bring Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) support to Linux through Steam Proton (via Tom's Hardware). As a result, people with the best NVIDIA GPUs will be able to use DLSS on their Linux systems.
DLSS is an upscaling technology that allows systems to improve performance and fidelity. Our Rich Edmonds explains its benefits and how it works in a post on ray tracing and DLSS:
It's what NVIDIA is using to make ray tracing have less of a negative impact on performance. Super sampling is already present in some games that support it, effectively allowing the GPU and PC to render the game at a higher resolution than what the monitor can handle.
Normally, DLSS needs a few things to work, a supported RTX GPU, Windows, and a game to support it. As a result, it is only available on Windows PCs running NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs. But thanks to NVIDIA partnering with Valve, Linux users get to use it as well.
The secret sauce for this partnership is Steam Proton, an open-source tool that allows Linux systems to run Windows games. It utilizes the Wine utility that is a popular way for Linux users to run Windows programs.
NVIDIA says that "Support for Vulkan titles is coming this month" and that DirectX support is "coming this fall."
