That is one of the options, that apparently a lot of the 3rd party devs are using. So far, all 1st party Nintendo titles are announced to include the game on the cartridge (not just a key)

It’s because it uses HBM (high bandwidth memory) as opposed to GDDR.

A short video explaining the differences https://youtu.be/CGIVKT0eM_s

I don’t think anyone was expecting a Ryzen 3rd Gen era board when you wrote decade old. It’s been 7 years since that board released (although I do admit that’s a lot closer to a decade then I though it would be).

This board will run any modern GPU. The motherboard doesn’t need to specifically be compatible with certain GDDR generations or what not, that is handled by the GPU itself, which communicates with the rest of the PC through PCIe*. You just need to make sure the PSU can deliver enough power.

You should update to the latest BIOS and enable resizable Bar: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000090831/graphics.html

*The ARC GPUs are 8° lanes of PCIe 4, your motherboard only has PCIe 3. This means that the bandwidth between the CPU and GPU is half of its maximum. In the vast majority of cases this will be a negligible performance difference of 1-2%, but some edge cases can lose you a bit more performance.

°If the GPU was 16 lanes this would be even less of a problem. Even the fastest GPUs can barely saturate 16 PCIe lanes. The fastest GPU, the Nvidia 5090, only loses 1-4% of performance when comparing PCIe 5x16 vs 3x16 (1/4 its max bandwidth): https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/nvidia-rtx-5090-pcie-50-vs-40-vs-30-x16-scaling-benchmarks

No, not Proton, but the dxvk stuff works on Windows too. You just need to replace some .dll files

Well there is d9vk and dxvk which translates directX 9, 10 and 11 to Vulkan and vkd3d which translates direct3D (directX 12) to Vulkan. So it’s all Vulkan on the Linux side, Proton ‘just’ uses one of these to translate the game into Vulkan or passes it through if the game is already Vulkan.

I don’t think there is a native (to GTA IV) Vulkan renderer in game though and therefore there isn’t anything more you can or have to do on Linux.

On Windows, some older games actually get performance improvements from the translation to Vulkan.

Quote from the wonderfully hilarious movie Popstar: Never Stop, Never Stopping.

“Nowadays if you don’t sell out, people will wonder if no one asked you to.”