I have highly suspect that Nvidia GPU driver is to blame for this problem as when I open ProtonDB for Beat Saber (https://www.protondb.com/app/620980) or Ancient Dungeon (https://www.protondb.com/app/1125240) you will notice that it doesn’t work on latest for people on Nvidia and it works flawlessy work people on latest AMD drivers.
How it looks from my side, is if I run a game that targeted OpenVR (Beat Saber on legacy1.29.1_unity_ver2019.4.28f1) it runs fine, but when I try the latest version (in short beta participation set to none) which target OpenXR, not OpenVR, the entire system hangs (cannot even run my mouse) after few seconds it resumes operability, but both SteamVR ang game crashes, what is strange is that it runs for a fraction of a second before it crashes.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (2.0 MB)
Additional information pointing to some Nvidia Driver bug is this one VR applications fail to load OpenXR library with stack overflow in Proton 8.0+ · Issue #7228 · ValveSoftware/Proton · GitHub “The OpenXR test demonstrates the same behavior as described in the initial report (stack overflow loading openxr_loader.so, followed by repeated “VR state wait timeout”). The test never prints any of the markers later than “preinit”.” Which exhibits the exact same (or at least similar) problems as games I’ve mentioned, what may be useful for Nvidia programmers is that it has a source file and steps to reproduce the behaviour.
Repro steps are as follows.
Have Steam and SteamVR installed on a Linux system and distro that SteamVR works as per Valve offical guidelines
Have a Steam account with access to Beat Saber or Ancient Dungeon
Have a Nvidia GPU
Run SteamVR
Then try to run those games (or probably any program compiled for OpenXR on Windows that runs through Proton on Linux)
Notice the what seems to be system wide GPU crash or hang.