Valve has released the first beta of Proton 11, the first major version update following the 10.x cycle. It’s still in beta and can be enabled through the dedicated channel in Steam, but there’s plenty worth knowing about what’s changing.

Wine 11 Under the Hood

The most significant change is the rebase on Wine 11.0, released in January, which brings improvements to Wayland support, better WoW64 architecture handling, ntsync usage where available, and more solid ARM64 support. On that front, Proton 11 also adds FEX-2604, a real-time x86 instruction translator for ARM64EC systems, opening the door to use on hardware with that architecture.

Key components have been updated accordingly: DXVK bumps to version 2.7.1, vkd3d-proton to the April 10 build, vkd3d to 1.19, Wine Mono to 11.0.0, and DXVK-NVAPI to 0.9.1. Overall, the translation of DirectX APIs to Vulkan, from DX9 to DX12, is more robust across the entire pipeline.

Games Restored and EA Fixes

On the compatibility front, several titles that only worked through Proton Experimental are being promoted to the main branch: among them DCS World Steam Edition, Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 in their original 1996 and 1998 versions, Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2, and Warhammer: Vermintide 2. Also playable again are Gothic 1 Classic, X-Plane 12, Breath of Fire IV, and Deadly Premonition.

Worth a separate mention is the fix for many EA games that became unplayable after a recent EA Desktop client update. The beta restores functionality and also addresses several Steam Overlay issues with those titles, along with improvements to the visual rendering of Rockstar Launcher popups.

Among other fixes: a crash in high enemy-density missions in HELLDIVERS 2, No Man’s Sky VR mode now working, video playback issues in Satisfactory, stuttering with Steam Overlay open for extended periods, and VR support for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

How to Try It

To enable Proton 11 beta on Steam, just go to Settings, Steam Play Compatibility section, and select the beta channel. Since this is a first beta, regressions can happen: if you notice games that worked with Proton 10 and now don’t, the GitHub project takes reports.