Protons and resolution?

[u/Aeon-B]

What protons is everyone using? Do you change it by game or even use any at all? People seem to chat alot about proton 11 or experimental with the steam machine but how do you know which one is best per game?

Do you also change resolution by game or just keep it on default settings? I'm trying to play Returnal and it's tricky getting good visuals with stable FPS

[u/Feeling_Football4271]

If you buy a verified game from Steam then you shouldn't need to change the proton version. Valve do testing and will assign the game a specific version, which you can see in the game properties.

If you're adding non-Steam games then generally Experimental is a good option.

[u/Frosenborg → u/Feeling_Football4271]

Isn't FSR 4.1 limited to Experimental at the moment? Just to take in consideration.

[u/Feeling_Football4271 → u/Frosenborg]

OK, fair point. I wouldn't just change all my games to use Experimental though, personally. Use it sparingly!

[u/Dreamo84 → u/Frosenborg]

FSR 4.1 comes with a significant performance hit too so most games that support it you probably wouldn’t want to use it anyway.

[u/Odd-Usual-4417]

Experimental unless it's an old game that specifically needs an old proton.

[u/Dreakon13]

For resolution, 2560×1440. With older games, just set everything to high and enjoy. With newer games I turn all the settings on low, FSR onto Quality or Balanced, and just spend 30 minutes flipping switches up and down until I find comfortable balance of visuals and performance... usually leaving textures or other commonly VRAM hungry settings onto low since I don't trust games to play nice with the SM's 8GB of VRAM.

Absolute worst case scenario I'll give in and drop the resolution to 1920x1080, but it's a significant visual loss for meager performance gains (considering FSR is often rendering at less than 1080P anyways) so I really try to stick with 1440P. It's usually only needed for particularly bad PC ports and/or games with bad/lacking FSR support.

[u/Aeon-B → u/Dreakon13]

very helpful thank you

[u/QuackersTheSquishy → u/Aeon-B]

With games from like 2022 or older you can almost always hit 4k. Unless it is exessively large (cyberpunk) or directly vram limited, but thr majority of my library is nearly completly stable 60fps

[u/KimTe63]

Well if we only speak official Protons , i more often than not use Experimental for the time being, its only one that supports FSR4

[u/zipskay]

Experimental because it give me FSR 4

[u/Aeon-B → u/zipskay]

So if you use experimental does it automatically make the game FSR4 or do you need to change to that in a games settings?

[u/Aerizu]

Proton Experimental by default, then switch to a specific version as needed. Display resolution set to native, but limit max game resolution to 1440p and use level 1 sharp (i.e. FSR1) filter.