Clarification from another person experiencing the same issue: a lot of the time the low fps issues persist even after closing the ship designer, forcing a save+reload to get rid of them.
Some more information I found: this issue seems to only happen with DXVK and nvidia GPU's. People using AMD GPU's report seeing no such issues, and in my testing, using proton-ge's PROTON_USE_WINED3D argument to avoid using dxvk makes the game significantly less laggy (but adds a lot of instability issues, so it's not a proper solution).
It seems like it might be a bug with the game itself. See more here: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/2990
I've been getting a freeze and then crash to desktop when looking around bodies that are not earth
GPU: RX 6700XT
Driver/LLVM version: kernel amdgpu module / llvm 12.0.0
Kernel version: 5.15.0-46-generic
Link to full system information report as Gist: sysinfo
Proton version: 7.0-4
game freezes with no response from keyboard or mouse clicks
game crashes to desktop after ~30 seconds
pan camera around any space body
I've had this happen to me on mars, a Kuiper belt object, and an asteroid in the asteroid belt
Try reducing your texture settings. The game is known to load excessive amounts of textures, overwhelming VRAM.
The combat section of the game doesn't work properly, with unplayable visual glitches - the lasers and magnetic weapon shells covering the screen in black rectangles.
Tried running every proton version on steam, 5 and bellow doesn't even launch, and got a bunch of forks to try too, but nothing fixes it. Had a friend test it on their pc with amd gpu, same problem. Oddly another friend with an nvidia card didn't have this problem. Switching to opengl rendering fixes the black rectangles, but comes with plenty of other problems. Surprisingly running the game on lutris and wine-staging-wow64 instead of proton, with opengl, renders the best, but not perfect.
In combat, laser fire and magnetic weapon shells have visual glitches, like black spots on them, and cause big black rectangles to appear/flicker on the screen that block the view.
Start a battle (either in a normal game, or using the skirmish option in the main menu) with multiple ships that have laser weapons and/or magnetic weapons (railguns, coilguns) and start shooting.
Lasers will look glitchy, and with several lasers firing at the same time (maybe 5, the more the better) the screen will get covered in black rectangles.
For magnetic weapon shells, just zoom in on one and the flame looking tail will be glitchy, and the closer in you zoom in the worse the black rectangles covering the screen will get.
@WillTellR Thank you for the report. This should be fixed on Proton Bleeding Edge. Do report back if there still are issues
proton experimentalx1 2026-09PROTON_USE_WINED3Dx1 2022-10
Compatibility Report
System Information
I confirm:
steam-1176470.log.tar.gz
Symptoms
Frame rate drops to below 1 fps on the ship designer screen. Rest of the game runs fine.
Reproduction