Forza Horizon 6 finally works on the Steam Deck and Linux gaming PCs thanks to a Proton hotfix Valve silently pushed to Steam

Forza Horizon 6 is Playground Games' latest entry into the Horizon series that takes place in Japan. Despite supporting both Windows and SteamOS, the game initially had broken Linux support during the game's advanced access period, causing crashes in-game. Luckily, GamingOnLinux reports that Valve has pushed a Proton hotfix that at least partially rectifies the issue and makes the game playable again on Linux operating systems.

When Forza Horizon 6 first entered advanced access, the game reportedly needed "horrible" workarounds to run on Linux at all on AMD GPUs. Some of these workarounds included changing the sampler heap to 2047, mitigation for bugs causing bad aliasing between image descriptors and buffer descriptors on RDNA 3 and 4, and more. Even with workarounds applied, at least one user reported crashing issues on an RDNA 4 GPU. The situation is even worse for NVIDIA gamers who need to wait for a new NVIDIA driver to fix the game's playability issues, and there's no timeline on when NVIDIA will provide this driver update.

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There are not enough user reports to confirm how well Valve's latest hotfix is working with Forza Horizon 6; however, GamingOnLinux tested the hotfix on the Steam Deck and a Ryzen 7 5800X/RX 6800-based machine and found the game runs stably after multiple hours of gameplay without crashing. There are still performance-related stuttering problems in-game that are not Linux-related, but at the very least, the game appears to be playable now on Linux through Proton.

Forza Horizon 6 is proving to be a very popular game for Microsoft; the racing title has already made at least $20 million from the game's advanced access period alone. For the uninitiated, advanced access was an early access period that you could get into if you paid for the $120 version of the game (the base game costs $70). The game is also the first title to debut with advanced shader delivery, a feature that precompiles shaders and then downloads them to your PC. The tech reportedly reduces game load times by 95%.