Forza Horizon 5 is a new racing video game developed by Playground Games and published by Xbox Game Studios.
Before its official launch, it already had ~1 million players via the premium edition, which enabled early access to the game.
While the game is breathtaking with its visuals and optimization for older hardware, it is yet another Windows-only game.
Fortunately, it is also available on Steam. So, there is a possibility of trying it out using the proton compatibility layer on Linux.
Forza Horizon 5 on Linux Seems Like a Reality
Initially, the state of Forza Horizon 4 running on Linux was poor. It was unplayable as per the reports on ProtonDB.
With improvements to Proton (or SteamPlay for Linux), now there’s a silver rating to it. It’s still not satisfactory, but better than nothing.
And, the story doesn’t get better with Forza Horizon 5, with an unplayable rating on ProtonDB.
However, I noticed a few individuals have succeeded in their attempts to run Forza Horizon 5.
Jeremy Soller (a System76 engineer) shared a tweet where he can be seen playing Forza Horizon 5 on Pop!_OS 21.10 Beta:
And, he wasn’t alone; Tom (aka GloriousEggroll), Wine-staging maintainer and Proton-GE developer, also shared a tweet playing Forza Horizon 5 on Linux:
Furthermore, GloriousEggroll mentions in the tweet thread:
Paul (one of the wine devs) pushed fixes to proton experimental, in addition to a fix that was needed in vkd3d. I ported them over to proton-ge already (along with the battleye patches -and- CEG drm patches).
So, it looks like you can play Forza Horizon 5 using Proton’s latest experimental bleeding-edge version.
Of course, this is not an ideal solution for everyone. But, it is good to know that the latest Proton Experimental bleeding-edge makes it possible to play Forza Horizon 5 (on Steam).
Should You Get Forza Horizon 5 on Steam for Linux?
If you are aiming to play it on Linux exclusively, you may want to wait it out.
As per a GitHub issue thread on Proton, it appears that there are some issues with the game, even if you use the bleeding-edge version of Proton Experimental.
But, if you want to help generate a bug report and test it out, feel free to try it out!
Of course, if you have dual-boot configured with Windows or have another Windows-powered system, you can purchase the game if you like.
Hopefully, with the next Proton Experimental or Stable release, we may get the necessary support for Forza Horizon 5!
What do you think about Forza Horizon 5 on Linux? Have you tested it for yourself?
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