Fixing Performance Issues in Dirt Rally 2.0

A while ago I suddenly began seeing wild framerate fluctuations and gradual performance drops as stages progressed in my current favorite car game, Dirt Rally 2.0. It took me a while to figure these out, and meanwhile the game was practically unplayable. Naturally I started my troubleshooting in the completely wrong end, until I realized the only thing that really could have changed was the Wine version used by Steam to run the game.

I went in to the game’s properties in Steam and opened the Compatibility section. There I checked the box to force the use of a specific version of the compatibility tool and gradually tried older versions of Proton until I arrived at version 7.0-6 which turned out to work as expected. All’s good, and the games runs as usual now.