I’m considering prioritizing buying GOG games when available, because they’re DRM-free, especially now that there’s a partner link through Heroic to show where my purchase is coming from. But a thought just occurred that those Windows-encoded videos were a problem on Steam until Valve started re-encoding those videos in other codecs on their servers. To my knowledge, there’s no legal way to distribute Proton with those codecs. Will I run into video playback problems on GOG games run via Proton? How has your experience been with that sort of thing?
Separately, I also remember Vulkan shader compilation being a problem, but it sounds like it’s less of an issue on modern versions of DXVK. Still, I’d be interested in hearing if stuttering problems for those things have been resolved as well, in your own experience.
Right, I’m familiar with what performance looks like when the shaders aren’t compiled, but is it still the very visible and tangible issue that it was back when Proton first came out, when playing a game through Heroic/GOG? If so, do modern enough games relieve the issue by having the shader compilation step within the game itself?
And as for the distribution of those codecs, does Heroic handle that automatically? Or if I have a version of Proton-GE, does it know to use that version when applicable?