On driver 595.58.03 issues still persist. Exactly the same. Every other region of the game can load fine, except Raccoon City with the /WineDetectionEnabled:False flag. I did notice also on the previous driver that the ending game cutscene crashed. But that might not be related.

I have the same issue : games simply freezes when I load a save in RC with Leon or when I start a new game, but works fine in the final area.

Running Bazzite with a 4090 and the latest Nvidia drivers added to Bazzite today (595.58.03).

I attach a log file : the last part is when the game runs fine in the lab, the parts before that with the hundreds of errors are when it freezes.

steam-3764200.log

I think it started happening with the 595 branch drivers, before that I was able to complete the game with no issue - although I did encounter random crashes in the first days of trying to play the game (see here). They were "fixed" and I was finally able to play and complete the game, but I don't know what had changed that made the crashes stop.

Same issue here with 4080S. Game freezes on any Raccoon City area load with /WineDetectionEnabled:False on Nvidia 595 drivers. Confirmed on both 595.45.04 and 595.58.03.

Removing the flag fixes the freeze but disables ray tracing and path tracing.

Extended testing and root cause analysis

System: RTX 4090, NVIDIA 595.58.03, CachyOS (kernel 6.x with split lock detection), proton-cachyos-10.0-20260324

Key finding: this is not Raccoon City specific

The freeze happens on every loading screen when /WineDetectionEnabled:False is set, not just Raccoon City:

• Fresh install, all settings LOW, RT OFF, no DLSS, no Frame Gen → freeze on Raccoon City save load
• Brand new game, first loading screen before the first cutscene → freeze

Earlier reports attributing this to Raccoon City were likely coincidental — users had saves there when they updated to the 595 driver branch.

What the flag actually changes (VKD3D log analysis)

I captured full VKD3D_DEBUG=warn logs with and without the flag. The flag enables "Windows mode" which activates multiple D3D12 features simultaneously:

Mesh Shaders: 16 Mesh Shader (MS) pipeline types appear that don't exist in the no-flag run — AGBufferMeshletListMS, AShadowMeshletListMS, ForwardMeshletListMS, GBufferMeshletListMS, ShadowMeshletListMS, HardwareDepthRaterizerMS, etc. Without the flag (Wine detected), the engine uses only VS (Vertex Shader) variants of these.

Sparse/Tiled Resources: Texture allocation patterns differ — 348 alignment messages with the flag vs 1,698 without, indicating different resource allocation strategies (sparse/reserved resources vs traditional committed resources).

Pipeline counts: 41,446 cache misses with flag vs 40,420 without — the ~1,000 difference corresponds to the additional MS pipeline types.

Feature isolation tests

The game requires full sparse/tiled resource support (Tier 2+) when running in Windows mode. Reducing sparse capabilities at the Vulkan level causes an immediate launch crash. This rules out Vulkan-level feature interception.

Workarounds tested — all failed

Summary

/WineDetectionEnabled:False enables the RE Engine's full "Windows mode" D3D12 feature set: mesh shaders, sparse/tiled resources, DXR, bindless resources. These features cannot be individually disabled — the game validates expected capabilities at startup and crashes if any are missing. The Xid 109 occurs regardless of RT/PT quality settings, on any loading screen, and is not mitigated by any user-accessible vkd3d-proton configuration flag or the PROTON_VKD3D_HEAP=1 workaround that helps other 595-driver titles.

The regression window is between early 595 beta (which worked) and 595.58.03 stable.

The fix likely needs to come from the NVIDIA driver side (the GPU context switch timeout is a driver-level event) or from vkd3d-proton's handling of the combination of mesh shader pipelines and sparse binding operations that Windows mode enables.

Just wanted to add an update. Still crashing on newest driver version 595.71.05 using /WineDetectionEnabled:False. So latest Nvidia update hasn't addressed the issue, still.

NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:01:00: GPU-255da99b-09da-7650-26f7-6727028f97ae
NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 109, pid=8648, name=re9.exe, channel 0x0000004a, errorString CTX SWITCH TIMEOUT, Info 0x51c053

Just wanted to add an update. Still crashing on newest driver version 595.71.05 using /WineDetectionEnabled:False. So latest Nvidia update hasn't addressed the issue, still.

Is it established that it's up to nvidia to address this or is that an assumption? It's certainly sus that there was an earlier driver where it apparently worked and nvidia do break drivers intermittently, but there's innumerable examples of an app doing seriously broken things that just happen to work until they don't.

Is it established that it's up to nvidia to address this or is that an assumption? It's certainly sus that there was an earlier driver where it apparently worked and nvidia do break drivers intermittently, but there's innumerable examples of an app doing seriously broken things that just happen to work until they don't.

I'm unsure myself. It is odd, because on 580 drivers this feature seems to have worked fine, no crashing and that's with the Windows mode (/WineDetectionEnabled:False). So the fact this, for some reason doesn't work on 590+ is very bizarre.

Earlier reports attributing this to Raccoon City were likely coincidental — users had saves there when they updated to the 595 driver branch.

This doesn't appear to be the case, at least not for me. Game runs fine with /WineDetectionEnabled:False on my 3090, right up until the first raccoon city cutscene, then crashes whenever I load and finish/skip the cutscene.
Seems to get further without issue when the WineDetection flag isn't set.

Earlier reports attributing this to Raccoon City were likely coincidental — users had saves there when they updated to the 595 driver branch.

This doesn't appear to be the case, at least not for me. Game runs fine with /WineDetectionEnabled:False on my 3090, right up until the first raccoon city cutscene, then crashes whenever I load and finish/skip the cutscene. Seems to get further without issue when the WineDetection flag isn't set.

For me this is also Raccoon City specific

I can play through the entire game without any major issues (sometimes crashing in the intro on the street at certain areas while walking to the crime scene, but that's about it)

But any use of the WineDetection flag false, there is 0% chance to load into Raccoon City, so I cannot use RT/PT at all, still an ongoing issue

Again, for me it is also Raccoon City specific, I am able to load into any prior level easily related to the Care Center or the game's prologue sequence on the street

Interestingly, on PS5 Pro, the game has just been patched to enable RT on PS5 Pro in the fidelity modes, and this is also specific to Raccoon City (it was disabled previously), apparently there was a major issue with RT noise before, which is now fixed, I'm wondering if a soon or similar patch will be coming for PC which makes this section playable with this flag on PC for both RT and PT, not sure if it is related though, just found it odd it was the same area causing RT issues on both PS5 Pro and PC

I tested the latest CachyOS Proton-SLR build, the game was able to launch successfully and load into the starting scene with Grace, without triggering the GPU hang issue (Xid 109).

However, enabling this workaround introduces noticeable lighting and rendering issues in-game - incorrect scene illumination, broken shadows/reflections, and inconsistent lighting behaviour. Gameplay remains functional, but visual fidelity is degraded enough that the workaround is not currently ideal.

issue appears to be fixed in Nvidia driver 610.43.02

issue appears to be fixed in Nvidia driver 610.43.02

Confirmed on my system! Was able to load my Racoon City save that had been crashing with full path tracing enabled again through /WineDetectionEnabled:False.

Confirmed over here too, the newest nvidia driver 610.43.02 fixes this issue, no game stalling when loading into Raccoon City now

I am actually seeing a very similar but intermittent issue on my AMD 7900xtx. I did have freezing occasionally on the load screen before, like maybe 1 out of 20 times, but now that I have hit Raccoon City I am getting random freezes mid game. Has happened about 5 times and I have played about an hour into that area.

Going to try removing the wine detection flag and see if that fixes that issue.

Could be unrelated but SEO is bringing me here when I google so for other folks hitting this issue I figured I would leave a post here for posterity.

System information

GPU: AMD 7900xtx
Driver: Mesa 26.1.3 (system) Mesa 26.0.8 (Steam Flatpak)
VKD3D-Proton version: Proton experimental-11.0.20260701b

EDIT: Nope still an issue even when removing /WineDetectionEnabled:False