I've seen quite a few YouTubers talking about Wine/Proton combined with NT Sync lately, highlighting some impressive increases in FPS. I'm curious, is NT Sync really that effective, and does it work well with Steam games too? I came across a documentation page for Debian that mentions NT Sync is part of kernel 6.14. I plan to try it out for myself but I'm especially interested in hearing others' experiences. Additionally, does it perform well on older hardware with fewer threads?
2 Answers
NT Sync is definitely a game changer compared to the standard Wine, especially since updates like fsync and esync wouldn't have made it into upstream Wine without it. Right now, the version of Proton on Steam doesn't include NT Sync, but that might change in Proton 11 once it's ready. Don't expect earth-shattering improvements in performance with Proton, though. It's designed with both esync and fsync active, which are quite effective already. NT Sync could give some boost in specific scenarios, but overall, gaming performance is often similar to what you'd get from fsync.
NT Sync is a Linux kernel module that introduces some of the synchronization features from the Windows NT kernel. This is significant since previously, these had to be managed in user space, leading to a lot of slow context switching. By bringing some of these processes into the kernel, it reduces latency and speeds things up a bit. That said, there’s still some context switching involved due to kernel calls, but it’s less than before.
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