Description

Resident Evil 9 produces persistent visual artifacts on RTX 5090 (Blackwell). This is not limited to the opening area — artifacts persist through gameplay including the first save point (fuse repair section with the female lead).

The artifacts appear as elongated triangular spikes — thin, sharp, with a flat base tapering to a point. Multiple spikes criss-cross in all directions, concentrated toward the center of the screen but appearing anywhere in the frame. The color of the spikes tends to match the surrounding environment, as if a piece of the background texture has been sampled and stretched into a sharp triangular shape. Occasionally the spikes have black and white patterns.

The artifacts are most prominent when:

• Looking straight ahead (center of screen)
• There is motion from other objects in the scene
• They are significantly reduced or absent when looking down
• They are intermittent — some frames are clean, most are not

No combination of settings or workarounds has eliminated these artifacts. Every VKD3D_CONFIG flag, shader quirk, and pipeline modification tested had zero effect (see full list below). Disabling SSR/SSS in the game's graphics settings also does not resolve the issue.

Additional graphics quality issues on Blackwell: Beyond the spike artifacts, general rendering quality appears degraded on RTX 5090 with vkd3d-proton — the female lead character has thin, wirey hair (like stray filaments), water on the floor appears pixelated, and surface textures overall lack the expected fidelity.

Note: This is visually distinct from #2852, which manifests as bright spider-web patterns on opaque brick walls. That issue is resolved by instruction_qa_checks on Turing/Ampere — none of those workarounds affect this artifact. See my [corrected comment on #2852](https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/issues/2852#issuecomment-3999963849) for additional context.

Screenshots

(See attached images below)

System

• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5090 (Blackwell)
• Driver: 590.48.01
• Proton Experimental 10.0-20260227
• vkd3d-proton: 576e3ced
• Ubuntu 24.04, kernel 6.17
• Display: 5120x1440 (ultrawide)

Reproduction

1. Launch RE9 via Proton Experimental
2. Play through the opening rainy alley area and beyond — artifacts appear immediately and persist through gameplay
3. Look straight ahead while NPCs or objects are in motion — triangular spike artifacts appear across the scene
4. Look down at the ground — artifacts significantly reduced
5. Artifacts persist regardless of SSR/SSS settings

Workarounds tested — all ineffective

Additional observations

• VKD3D_SHADER_OVERRIDE prevents the game from launching (same as noted in #2852)
• RenderDoc Vulkan capture layer does not suppress the artifacts (unlike on RTX 3070 per #2852). Artifacts are visible in captured frames.
• RenderDoc captures (19GB, 3 frames with artifacts visible) are available if useful for debugging.
• This is on a different GPU architecture (Blackwell) than #2852 reports (Turing/Ampere). The artifacts, their behavior, and their resistance to all known workarounds suggest a Blackwell-specific issue — potentially in the NVIDIA shader compiler or driver's handling of vkd3d-proton's SPIR-V output.