Starfield does not launch on most NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, and not at all on Pascal GPUs

Graphics / Linux Linux
24

I continued testing to find a potential temporary fix. While the shader_model=6_6 helped starting the game, I now encounter constant crashes while playing for either a few seconds or a few minutes, and also confirmed this works with both 530 and 525 drivers, and the 525 version shows more clear graphic corruption and artifacts than 530. However both seem equally unstable, exiting the game with Xid 11 (which is apparently “Invalid or corrupted push buffer stream”). Sometimes the freeze requires rebooting the computer entirely, as it is not fixable.

I tested all 535 driver versions available on custom versions in github/nvidia-all, none of them manage to get in game, they crash during loading, or at loading end.

I tested this potential fix for crash issues:

Which requires adding:
VKD3D_CONFIG=no_upload_hvv VKD3D_CONFIG=force_host_cached
to already used VKD3D_SHADER_MODEL=6_6
But this does not help.

I will try using gamescope to remedy the crash issues as suggested by someone on Protondb (believed to arise from alt-tabbing in game). Although I am dubious of the claim since I do not tab out and the crash appear anyway.

Thanks again

1 Like
25

Driver 525.125.06 patched for kernel 6.5.1 is the most stable combination I’ve tested so far, allowing the game to played for extended periods with terrible performance but no crashing. Patching driver 530.41.03 for kernel 6.4.14 allows for greatly improved performance at the cost of random crashing on loading screens.

This issue is directly related to a bug with VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute in driver version 530+

More information about the issue:

Distro: Gentoo
Driver: 535.43.09
Kernel: 6.5.1
VKD3D: vkd3d: Enable NV_dgcc on newer drivers. · HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton@2044ea1 · GitHub
Proton: GE 8-14
Vulkan: 1.3.262
DE: i3 version 4.21-126-g30131ed6+

GPU: RTX 2080Ti
CPU: Ryzen 9 5950x

4 Likes
26

Thanks, I’m also trying 525.125.06 on latest manjaro kernel 6.5.01, but it seems to crash a lot, I’m unsure if something changed as I thought day one of trying this that it was pretty good.

I often get Xid 11 but Xid 13 happens on a lot of crashes, again with a lot of graphical glitches it is quite remarkable it lasts a few minutes before crashing.

[ 1009.245913] NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:07:00: GPU-b62e513b-bd4f-18c0-4e9b-2a046dd5d346
[ 1009.245918] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:07:00): 13, pid=‘’, name=, Graphics Exception: SKEDCHECK02_LOCA
L_MEMORY_LOW_SIZE failed
[ 1009.245921] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:07:00): 13, pid=‘’, name=, Graphics Exception: SKEDCHECK06_REGI
STER_COUNT failed
[ 1009.245923] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:07:00): 13, pid=‘’, name=, Graphics Exception: SKEDCHECK14_SHAR
ED_MEMORY_SIZE failed
[ 1009.245924] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:07:00): 13, pid=‘’, name=, Graphics Exception: SKEDCHECK16_CTA_
THREAD_DIMENSION_ZERO failed
[ 1009.245930] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:07:00): 13, pid=‘’, name=, Graphics Exception: ESR 0x407020=0xa
02200 0x407028=0xc00 0x40702c=0x10520fb 0x407030=0x0
[ 1009.246127] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:07:00): 13, pid=18763, name=Starfield.exe, Graphics Exception: ChID 00bf, Class 0
000c1c0, Offset 00000418, Data 00000000

Distro: Manjaro KDE Plasma
Driver: 535.43.09
Kernel: 6.5.1
Proton: GE 8-14
GPU: GTX 1080
CPU: Ryzen 5600x

27

Ty for putting more work into this nuclei than it appears nvidia is, will not be buying another one of their GPUs again.

2 Likes
28

Idk, it seems NVIDIA is doing the responsible thing and tracking the bug, the timeline is likely a few days / a week / or more so they should have plenty of information to work on this.

You can also look at Starfield (1716740) · Issue #7064 · ValveSoftware/Proton · GitHub for people also trying things.

A fix should come at some point. Windows drivers are also not ideal at the moment, so there is a lot of work for NVIDIA rn.

1 Like
29

Game has been released more than a week ago and no fix yet, Nvidia really don’t care about Linux customers, sad.
My next GPU will be branded AMD, I’m bored of those closed source drivers they don’t care about.

4 Likes
30

Really appreciate all the folks in the thread contributing so much great information for Nvidia. It’s a shame that nobody at Nvidia tried to launch such a highly anticipated game with their latest drivers at least once before release and instead relies on the community.

Hopefully we can see a fix soon but this is definitely making me second guess my graphics card purchase as a loyal Nvidia customer of many years and more recent adopter of Linux. Of course issues are expected from time to time but this is pretty blatant, I can’t imagine the uproar if Nvidia’s Windows customers found a similar level of bug on launch day.

1 Like
31

Agreed. I’d only purchased my mobile 4080 & 4090 based laptops for DLSS3 (which is great) but second class support for open platforms (where the owner still retains control of their own hardware…) has overshadowed the benefit of DLSS3 in my jaded opinion. I’m now willing to suffer the inferior AMD performance in exchange for compatibility. Sad times today and darker times ahead I fear.

32

@Wen_Su Any deadlines on this one? I understand that linux community is not a priority for nv, however it would be nice for us to understand this fix will take days, weeks or months.

I can confirm everything that was said before, drivers 525xx drivers running around 20-30fps, 535xx drivers not working at all. Arch linux kernel 6.4.12 with RTX3070

1 Like
33

Sad reality of linux gaming is that this game is not designed to play on linux in any way and doesn’t have any linux distribution as a preferable operating system. So you should say “thanks” that Starfield uses vulkan as graphics API at first place, and when all this fixes will be shipped we can play it 140-150fps easy just because of vulkan.

So technically nvidia is fixing their products for a platform that doesn’t even supported by game devs in any way. This is roughly the same if I will complain about doom 2015 not running properly on chrome-os or ms-dos or whatever not supported OS out there.

34

Starfield uses DX12, not Vulkan.

vkd3d-proton which is included in Proton, is a D3D12 to Vulkan translation layer which does the heavy work here.

2 Likes
35

Yeah, thought they will support vulkan, sadly they don’t, so we’ll suffer a bit more

36

I am also having the issue where the game crashes on load screens. I can’t rollback to 530 (not compatible with 6.4 kernel) and version 525 is no longer available on my distro

37

Are you using a rolling-release distro like Manjaro? It can be difficult to find and install the drivers you want.

If you can, try GitHub - Frogging-Family/nvidia-all: Nvidia driver latest to 396 series AIO installer
The following commands should help:

git clone https://github.com/Frogging-Family/nvidia-all.git
cd nvidia-all
makepkg -s

(you can use makepkg -si but I prefer doing a couple more commands)

Follow the prompt to choose if you want a specific version of 525, 530, 535, you can find the version you want with the following links:
Official Advanced Driver Search | NVIDIA (choose linux 64bit)
Releases · NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules · GitHub (these show additional releases but some are in the vulkan dev branch, not mainstream)

after makepkg -s, you have to do:

sudo pacman -U *.zst

To clean up the folder, I do:

mkdir tmp_zst
mv *.zst tmp_zst

After reboot, you should have the proper libraries for steam to launch and test the game.

3 Likes
38

Can we get an update for this? AMD users are happily playing away while we are still f****ed.

39

NVIDIA driver team is actively working on this bug. Here is a update from last week investigation. There appears to be 2 issues.

  1. Failure to launch on Pascal GPU with “Error: Graphics card does not meet the minimal specifications requirements” is due to a missing extension required by VKD3D. Due to hardware limitation, it is not possible to add support.
  2. Failure to launch on Turing and later GPUs. We are still working on a root cause for this.
    Sorry for the inconvenience. We are still working hard on this bug. We are aiming to provide a fix in the next driver branch.

Wen

7 Likes
40

Thank you for the update and the hard work. I’m personally not familiar with how NVIDIA’s driver schedule is. Do you release drivers on a schedule, or wait for there to be enough substantial work done on a driver and then release it whenever that may be?

1 Like
41

I cannot give exact schedule for the next driver release which depends on many factors. There is a good cadence to the NVIDIA driver releases. You can view the history of official release drivers at the official site.

3 Likes
42

Thanks for the update Wen.

However, I think 1/ is very odd given that Pascal GPUs are well within the minimum requirements for the game, as well as able to run the game with the VKD3D_SHADER_MODEL=6_6 %command% makes the game run properly.

Will you be able to fix the crashes with the latest additions to vkd3d-proton?

The issues are crashes related to the driver, present in 535 issues I guess.
Otherwise it should be able to run the game.

Thanks for the work.

1 Like
43

Does this mean Pascal GPUs will not be recieving a fix?