From last year to this year, I played two PC games: Black Myth and WuChang, both downloaded and played on their release days. This would have been hard to imagine five years ago. Back then, I had just finished Monster Hunter: World’s main story using a Windows KVM virtual machine with GPU passthrough. When the Iceborne expansion was released, Proton could already support quite a few older games, but the latest games were difficult to support at launch. I remember it took two to three months after Iceborne’s official PC release before the game could be launched, and there were still some bugs. Moreover, whenever Proton was updated, the game might become unplayable again…
Later, I recall when Cyberpunk 2077 was released, it still couldn’t run on launch day. It took a few weeks before 2077 could run on the Proton compatibility layer. By then, I had upgraded my graphics card and tested it out. There were no major issues getting in, but Chinese fonts and some in-game videos had problems. This was quite acceptable… I just wasn’t that interested in Cyberpunk 2077’s theme, so I didn’t actually play it.
For several years after that, I didn’t play PC games anymore. My computer was mainly used for analytical testing, and there wasn’t enough hard drive space for games. I mostly played on my Switch.
Then came the release of Black Myth in 2024. Coincidentally, I had changed jobs and didn’t need to use my computer for work anymore, so I reinstalled the system and tried Bazzite, as it was the only SteamOS-like distribution that supported Nvidia cards at the time. Honestly, the performance exceeded my expectations—the game could be launched on release day. Although the smoothness wasn’t perfect, as someone who’s played as a “pixel hunter”… 540p at less than 30 FPS wasn’t unfamiliar to me. 1080p at 40-60 FPS was completely acceptable, and the game itself wasn’t too difficult, so I followed along with everyone and finished it.
This year’s WuChang surprised me even more. I didn’t keep the Bazzite system—I just installed Nvidia’s proprietary drivers on Ubuntu 22.04, and the game could be launched directly. The performance was similar to last year’s Black Myth, and I could even stream it to my iPad (to use my NS controller) without lag…
This means I should be able to try out domestically produced games as soon as they’re released from now on…
Thank you, Gabe. I wish you the best in eventually overtaking Windows…
