If you experience game breaking stuttering in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on Linux, try switching to an older version of Proton, such as 3.x

Back in 2013 or so, I played Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on an old VAOI laptop that at one point ran Windows, and at another point ran Linux Mint. Although it wasn’t the best laptop, the game ran flawlessly…wait no it didn’t. I just got used to playing it at 23 FPS hehe.

I saw no reason to continue playing after beating it once or twice, so I put the game down for a couple of years.

Now, I’ve got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 that should be able to run the game flawlessly. And yet, I boot up a new character and experience absolutely horrendous stuttering. I’m talking heavy stuttering every second that makes the game boot you out for having a low framerate. What happened??? Even my VAOI years ago gave me better FPS than this.

Why not just buy Dark Souls: Remastered? It has a platinum rating on ProtonDB.

Because I do not want to ❤️.

I just happened to notice someone online had the same issue starting with Windows 10, which gave me an idea. I switched to a lower version of Proton, one of the 3.x versions. That seemed to have fixed the game!

It’s a shame for Windows players. Who knows how they’d fix this problem. Move back to Windows 7?