DualSense advanced features compatibility

DualSense feature compatibility

EDIT: the patches at discussed in this thread have now been merged in Proton Experimental; they allow using DualSense-specific features (Adaptive triggers, speaker, VCM-based haptics) in at least:

• Final Fantasy XIV Online
• Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade (the game does not make use of the speaker, and only makes light use of the other features)
• Ghostwire: Tokyo (note that the game does not appear to use the speaker, unlike the PS5 version)
• Deathloop (for the speaker to be used, XAudio2 needs to be disabled, see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/5900#issuecomment-1180859190)
• Returnal™
• Season: A Letter to the Future
• Horizon: Forbidden West
• The Last of Us™ Part 1

All features require the DualSense to be plugged through USB before starting the game and Steam Input to be disabled for Playstation controllers (or simply Steam Input being disabled for the specific game). I have not found hid-playstation to cause any issue (apart from registering additional events on the touchpad which could interfere in some games).

Technical details

All DualSense features are implemented directly in the game application, with no additional driver. However, the games' implementation rely on low-level APIs that may not be implemented in Wine or details that may be different on a typical Linux environment.

Adaptive triggers work through custom HID reports, so this will work out of the box as long as Steam Input is disabled.

Speaker and advanced haptics rely on a 4-channel audio device, and the difficulties lie in games finding and selecting that audio output. Various games use various means to do it, but from what I have seen, it mainly boils down to one or more of these:

• have the audio device name contain “Wireless Controller” (FF14 and FF7R do that)
• get the BaseContainerID from the HID device and select the first MMDevice with the same ContainerID (Ghostwire: Tokyo, Deathloop)
• get the BaseContainerID from the HID device and use SetupDi to find an audio device with the same BaseContainerID (Deathloop does that for the speaker if XAudio2 is available)

I have written a sample test application to sum up these findings and test Wine/Proton against those behaviors without requiring the games: https://github.com/ClearlyClaire/dualsense-games-compat-check

Start with the technical details in this issue and run the linked DualSense compatibility test application against Wine/Proton. Compare the reported behavior with the listed games and DualSense features; done means the relevant compatibility behavior is supported and verified without requiring those games.