Shadow of the Tomb Raider performance comparison of Proton and native port

Feral Interactive's native Linux port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been out for a little over a week now. It is, without a doubt, the best Linux port we've seen from them, ever. Recent advances in Wine and Valve's Proton have been paradigm shifts for Linux gaming, but the SotTR port just emphasizes how great games can really run on Linux. I sincerely hope we continue to get high-quality Linux releases like this in the future.

Benchmark Setup

The builtin SotTR benchmark was run on the default "High" graphics preset. Immediately after a full power cycle, each benchmark was run twice and the results from the second was used as the result in each case. The most recent Proton release 4.11-8 was used in DirectX 11 mode with DXVK. The Nvidia driver version was 435.21.

Results

Jumping right into it, the final results are in the charts below. The first chart shows the calculated framerates during the benchmark and the second chart is the absolute FPS difference between the two tests. FPS of the native version was higher at all times compared to Wine+DXVK. The 3 different scenes in the benchmark are separated by the vertical dotted lines.


The framerates for Proton and native follow each other pretty closely during the first 2 scenes, with a small performance hit of between 3-5 FPS from the DXVK Vulkan translation. During the third scene however, the overhead was too much and the FPS started to diverge significantly. At times, it was even falling more than 20 FPS behind Feral's native port.


If anybody has some insight into what exactly it was in the third scene that tanked the framerate in Wine, please leave a comment below because I would love to know.

Check out our benchmark video too for a bit more insight into performance.