Which area of the game are you in? I just tried to reproduce the issue and it worked perfectly fine without crashing.

(A couple of streets from Times Square)

Ideally you could just upload your save game.

Which area of the game are you in? I just tried to reproduce the issue and it worked perfectly fine without crashing.

I've not even started playing the game yet. I just loaded up the game, went into graphics settings and tried to turn on ray tracing. The game crashes the instant I turn on ray tracing, right in the graphics settings screen. I don't even get a chance to get out of the menus and actually start the game.
And after this, now that ray-tracing is turned on, the game doesn't even launch any more -- it straight crashes as soon as I launch from steam. I have to manually edit the Windows registry settings inside that game's prefix to disable RT reflections and then it will start working again.

There's a bunch of people reporting that ray tracing causes a crash ( https://www.protondb.com/app/1817070?device=pc ), so I'm not the only one observing this.

Do you have some kind of mod installed?

No, just plain vanilla install from Steam.

I did have VKD3D_CONFIG='dxr,no_rt_const_buffer_cbv,no_render_pass,upload_hvv' in my command line when I generated the earlier attached log. I was trying different options I found online. But I did observe the same crash without these options too, and can generate a log file with these options removed if you want.

Is there any other information / debugging logs / dumps I can do to help root cause this further?

I did have VKD3D_CONFIG='dxr,no_rt_const_buffer_cbv,no_render_pass,upload_hvv' in my command line when I generated the earlier attached log

Please don't just use random configs or environment variables you find online without understanding what they do. That's not the problem here but it's a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

I removed other options and reduced my command line to:

PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 VKD3D_SHADER_DUMP_PATH=/tmp/shaders PROTON_LOG=1 %command%

I've attached the new log file and the shader dump.

Also, here's the error I see before the game terminates. I'm pretty sure it's incorrectly reported error because my 16GB video memory is far from being full

steam-1817070.log
shaders.zip

cbf29ce484222325.lib.dxil is zero sized, which is very curious. Are you sure the game install isn't corrupt or something? Try verifying local files. I don't get that empty DXIL when I dump shaders.

I verified all the files and ran this again, and dumped shaders. I still see that file 0 sized.

Do you have a strong reason to believe it could be due to corrupted files, even if Steam has verified all files? Enough to suspect that Steam has lost track of some files?
I am guessing this file cbf29ce484222325.lib.dxil is a DirectX shader even before vkd3d-proton translates it to Vulkan. Is this game is a direct game file or is it created on the fly? If it's latter, is there a way to add more debug flags to dump information at the point where this is being generated?

Do you have a strong reason to believe it could be due to corrupted files, even if Steam has verified all files? Enough to suspect that Steam has lost track of some files?

Yes. The code fails at a point where it does fairly simple things with data that's passed straight from the game.
On top of that none of us can reproduce the problem. It works perfectly fine here.

I am guessing this file cbf29ce484222325.lib.dxil is a DirectX shader even before vkd3d-proton translates it to Vulkan.

No. cbf29ce484222325 is the initial value that vkd3d-Proton passes to the hashing function.

It looks like the game is trying to create a shader with a length of 0 bytes (it explicitly passes 0 as the size).

I uninstalled the game, manually deleted all files under shadercache, compatdata, disabled cloudsaves -- even deleted proton installations completely. After this I installed it afresh, launched it (it runs fine so far), went into graphics settings and enabled "Ray-traced Reflections" and then the game instantly crashed.

Have you guys tried with a clean install (through Steam) on your side without any save files or even old files -- maybe it's some special scenario that's getting triggered only a fresh install?

How can I help move this forward -- Are there any other debug knobs or similar I can add to help dump more info on why a 0 byte shader is being created?
Clearly you guys have it working fine so it looks like it is possible, just that I'm hitting a corner-case in the codebase some how.

I’m having the exact same issue as Apparle running Bazzite and rx9070 with 16gb vram. Everything maxed out runs fine with plenty of vram and gpu only at 80%. The moment I turn on RT I get the same crash and have to delete the config file to reset the settings.

The crash is quite common -- just search for "ray" on https://www.protondb.com/app/1817070 or on reddit. I don't know enough, but I'm going to try some WINEDEBUG options to see if I can find more info. @HansKristian-Work if you're aware of any options to dump more verbose information at the point where the particular dxil lib is being constructed, that'll help.

The moment I turn on RT I get the same crash and have to delete the config file to reset the settings.

@alexy129 you don't need to delete the config and reset the settings. Instead edit this file ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1817070/pfx/user.reg and change RTReflections from 00000001 to 00000000 to undo turning-on ray tracing.

I'm seeing this same error on two Bazzite-deck systems with an RX 9070 XT (kernel 6.17.7, Mesa 25.3.3, Proton 10.0-3 and Proton-GE 10-28 tested with identical behavior). The error occurs if I enable RT reflections at either the High or Very High setting.
The error claims the system is out-of-memory but this is almost certainly erroneous. Testing on my RTX 5090 on Windows at 4K DLSS4 Quality at max settings with all RT settings maxed, VRAM usage is in the 11-12 GB range. I see this error even at 1440p native with just a single RT option enabled at its lowest setting, where VRAM usage should be below 10 GB.

I see the same behavior in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart when attempting to enable any of the RT features (Reflections, Shadows, AO). Both are games developed by Insomniac and ported by Nixxes.

GPU: RX 9070XT
Driver: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (radeonsi, gfx1201, LLVM 21.1.7, DRM 3.64, 6.17.7-ba25.fc43.x86_64)
Proton: GE-Proton10-28
Wine version: Changelog for GE 10-28 shows "latest bleeding edge Wine"
VKD3D-Proton version: Changelog for GE 10-28 shows latest git

After a lot of playing with WINEDEBUG options and trying to find errors, on a random fluke I tried adding

SteamDeck=0 %command%

That solved the problem and now I'm able to run the game fine with ray tracing enabled.
I notice that myself and others are using Bazzite. I'm guessing something in Bazzite's OS set up is mimicking SteamDeck too well Bazzite passes -steamdeck option to Steam to enable it's Quick-Access-Menu etc., which then internally sets SteamDeck=1. This leads to the game interpreting that it's running on a Steam Deck; and I'm guessing game devs have optimized for SteamDeck mode by cutting out things like ray tracing.

My problem seems to be solved -- others can report back if this fixes it for them.