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Proton 9.0-3 Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Valve has started testing the next stable Proton update, which brings in a slew of changes that have previously only been available in Experimental. Proton 9.0-3, the next update, is currently including a solid amount of new playable games, as well as some fixed regressions and individual game fixes to make sure everything is running as well as it can.

As for new playable games, we have FlatOut 3, Syberia, King of Fighters 13, Unity of Command 2, Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition, and even Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, though this is only in desktop mode. There are also a couple of demos like Owl Observatory and To Pixelia that are now working as well. There are also game fixes galore like improved language support for Guild Wars 2, controller support for the Fallout 3 launchers, Final Fantasy 12 working again on OLED, and an improved loading time for Arcanum.

There's a lot more in the changelog so far, and it is tentative so there may be some more changes piled in later! You can try the update for yourself by going to the Proton 9 library page, which you can find by searching Proton 9 with the top search bar on the Deck, and changing the beta to the 9.0 rc branch.

Proton 9.0-3 Update Tentative Changelog:

  • Now playable:
    • Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (desktop only)
    • Ball at Work: The Ultimate Speedrun Platformer!
    • Banyu Lintar Angin
    • Dinner with an Owl
    • Farlight 84
    • Flatout 3
    • KinitoPET
    • Owl Observatory Demo
    • Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition
    • Super
    • Sword of Convallaria
    • Syberia
    • THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII STEAM EDITION
    • To Pixelia Demo
    • Unity of Command II
    • Zaccaria Pinball
  • Fixed 9.0 regressions:
    • Alan Wake's American Nightmare's DLC is playable again.
    • Battlefield 1 is no longer failing to launch with Nvidia GPUs.
    • Bionic Commando is playable again.
    • Controllers work again in Sonic Forces.
    • GRID Autosport and GRID 2 are playable again.
    • Noita mods no longer fail to update.
    • Warhammer 40,000: Darktide no longer freezes randomly when processing shaders for the cache.
  • Improved language support for Guild Wars 2.
  • Enable controller support in the launchers of Fallout 3 (standard and GOTY edition) via Xalia.
  • Fixed cutscene playback in Iragon games.
  • Fixed Yakuza Kiwami not working on certain setups.
  • Added support for D3D12 in OpenXR.
  • Fixed AVPro playback in VRChat.
  • Fixed video quality of live streamed episodes in Quantum Break.
  • Fixed artifacts in Yakuza 4 Remastered opening video.
  • Improved support for workshop levels in Zeepkist.
  • Improved loading time of Arcanum.
  • Fixed Aimlabs having broken News section.
  • Fixed RAID: World War II randomly hanging on start.
  • Fixed Strip Fighter ZERO not starting on some setups.
  • Fixed Undecember not being playable after a recent game update.
  • Fixed missing cursor in IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover Blitz Edition.
  • Fixed a crash in Starfield: Creation Kit.
  • Fixed text not being displayed during the installation of EA Desktop launcher.
  • Fixed "Customize Setup" not working during EA Launcher installation.
  • Fixed Halo Infinite rendering using a weird resolution on a Steam Deck.
  • Improved microphone support in Squad.
  • Fixed License Agreement not displaying correctly in Romance of the Three Kingdoms [JP].
  • Fixed FINAL FANTASY XII THE ZODIAC AGE displaying white screen on launch on Steam Deck OLED.
  • Fixed microphone not working with Helldivers 2 after a recent game update.
  • Fixed freezes in Dinogen Online.
  • Fixed Dinogen Online crashing randomly on start.
  • Fixed SCP Secret Laboratory crashing after a recent game update.
  • Fixed Burnout Paradise Remastered crashing when an input video device is plugged in.
  • Improved memory usage of Burnout Paradise Remastered and lowered the chances of crashing.
  • Fixed font rendering in Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.
  • Fixed Knowledge, or know Lady crashing about 10 minutes after launch.
  • Fixed Once Human crashing when trying to join a server or opening the EULA on fresh Proton prefixes.
  • Fixed Ubisoft Connect requiring a manual log in with a new prefix with Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon (some other games may still suffer from that similarly as on Windows with a clean Ubisoft Connect install).
  • Fixed The Finals not being playable after a recent game update.
  • Fixed garbled videos in The Finals.
  • Fixed video playback in Spirit Hunter: NG.
  • Improved memory usage when playing videos in 32bit games.
  • Fixed font rendering in Shady Brook - A Dark Mystery Text Adventure.
  • Fixed Steam Deck users being forced to use MTL145 nickname in Project Kunai.
  • Fixed connecting with Unreal Insights to games running under Proton.
  • Added a warning that appears in Proton Log for systems that have low file descriptor limit (e.g. non-systemd distributions).
  • Fixed video playback in One Finger Death Punch.
  • Fixed Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit crashing when reaching first boss.
  • Updated Wine Mono to 9.2.0.
  • Updated vkd3d-proton to v2.13-64-g47840a4bb614.
  • Updated dxvk to v2.4-26-g02d8fa593b45.
  • Updated dxvk-nvapi to v0.7.1-19-gbd542144518d.

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Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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