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Abdullah Musa
Abdullah Musa

Posted on Originally published at musabase.com

I benchmarked Steam's bundled runtime against the native one on Arch, and the native build lost

#linux #gaming #archlinux #tutorial

Getting Windows games running on Arch Linux through Steam and Proton is a handful of commands. The part that actually decides whether a game is playable is which Steam runtime you launch, and almost nobody benchmarks that.

So I did. Same four games, same settings, same Proton versions, launched once under Valve's bundled runtime and once under the native one. The results were not what I expected going in.

Tested on: Arch Linux, KDE Plasma 6.5.5 on Wayland, kernel 6.18.6-arch1-1, Intel Core i5-4460, AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB on amdgpu with Mesa, 16GB DDR3. That's one machine, so treat the numbers as "works for me" until you've tried it yourself.

The setup, in four commands

1. Enable multilib. Steam needs 32-bit libraries. Uncomment these two lines in /etc/pacman.conf:

[multilib]
include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
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Then sync:

sudo pacman -Syu
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Skip this and Steam dies on launch with a wall of missing 32-bit library errors.

2. Install Steam and ProtonUp-Qt.

yay -S steam
yay -S protonup-qt
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3. Optionally install the native runtime, which is the thing I tested against. It's deprecated, which is worth knowing before you build a setup around it:

yay -S steam-native-runtime
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4. Launch it. Plain steam uses Valve's bundled runtime. The environment variable picks the other one:

steam
STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam
STEAM_RUNTIME=1 steam
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To confirm which one you're actually on, check Steam's Help, System Information. The bundled runtime reports a version string like steam-runtime_1.0.20251202.187498. The native one reports <Runtime disabled>.

Proton, briefly

Steam ships Proton Experimental, Sniper and Legacy. For anything they won't run, GE-Proton is the community build, installed through ProtonUp-Qt with Steam fully closed:

protonup-qt
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Then per game: Properties, Compatibility, tick "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool", pick your version.

Check ProtonDB before you launch anything. It's where you find both the Proton version other people got working and the launch options that fixed their crashes. That's where mine came from:

mangohud RADV_TEX_ANISO=0 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 %command%
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That's Red Dead Redemption 2 on GE-Proton 10.27. Forza Horizon 5 needed a DLL override instead:

mangohud WINEDLLOVERRIDES="winmm=n,b" %command%
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And GTA V Enhanced, on GE-Proton 10.25:

mangohud WINEDLLOVERRIDES="socialclub=n,b;version=n,b" %command%
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The runtime results

Here's the part worth the post.

  • Dota 2, which runs natively on Linux: the native runtime was smoother in team fights. That one makes sense. Native game, native libraries, no translation layer in the way.

Dota 2 running natively on Arch Linux

  • Red Dead Redemption 2 through Proton: standard Steam was more predictable. 60 to 75 FPS in open areas, dropping to the mid 30s in crowded ones.

Red Dead Redemption 2 running on Arch Linux

  • Forza Horizon 5 through Proton: standard Steam held a steady 60. The native runtime swung between 35 and 60 on the same settings.

Forza Horizon 5 running on Arch Linux

  • GTA V Enhanced through Proton on GE-Proton 10.25: both runtimes sat at a stable 60+, and the native one actually posted a slightly higher average.

Gta V Enhanced running on Arch Linux

So the honest answer is not the one I expected. Three of the four games either didn't care or mildly preferred the native runtime. Forza was the outlier, and it was a big one: same hardware, same Proton build, same graphics settings, with the runtime as the only variable, and the frame rate floor dropped by nearly half.

That's the thing worth knowing. Not "always use runtime X", but that the runtime is a variable that can quietly cost you 25 FPS in a specific game while doing nothing at all in the other three. If a game runs worse than ProtonDB says it should and you've already tried the obvious fixes, switch runtimes before you start blaming your GPU.

My default is standard Steam, because it's the supported path and it never lost badly in my testing. I keep the native runtime installed to test against when a game misbehaves. Worth knowing before you build around it: steam-native-runtime is deprecated.

The full guide

The complete walkthrough on my site has the per-game settings, the full comparison tables including GTA V Enhanced, screenshots of every step, the common mistakes section and an FAQ: Windows Games on Arch Linux (Part 1): Steam, Proton and ProtonUp-Qt Setup.

It's part of a series. ProtonUp-Qt and GE-Proton goes deep on custom Proton builds, Bottles covers non-Steam games, Wine covers the layer underneath all of it, and the whole thing starts at the Linux Gaming Roadmap.

One machine, four games, one GPU vendor. If you've tested the two runtimes on Nvidia or on newer AMD hardware and got different results, I'd genuinely like to hear it in the comments.

Originally published on MusaBase.

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