Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Red Dead Redemption 2
• Steam AppID of the game: 1174180

System Information

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB/PCIe/SSE2
• Driver/LLVM version: nvidia 535.86.05
• Kernel version: 6.3.12-200.fc38.x86_64 (64-bit)
• Link to full system information report as Gist: https://gist.github.com/jwakely/671e929d0257ea2b4a42824d8e1e183d
• Proton version: Experimental / 8.0-2 / 7.0-6 (same problem with all of them)

I confirm:

• [x] that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• [x] that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

Symptoms

When I click "Play" it says "Launching" and a message appears next to that button saying "Running install script (Vulkan Runtime Installer)" but then nothing ever happens, it just stays like that.

The file /home/jwakely/.local/share/Steam/standalone_installscript_progress_1174180.vdf keeps being recreated with this same content, so it seems to be stuck in a loop:

"progress"
{
        "current_step"          "0"
        "step_count"            "6"
        "current_step_description"              "Vulkan Runtime Installer"
}

When I add PROTON_LOG=1 %command% to the launch options no $HOME/steam-*.log file is created, so I can't attach it here.

I can click "Cancel", but a winedevice.exe process continues to run in the background. If I try to exit Steam it closes the client GUI but the Steam icon stays in the systray and I can't restart Steam. I have to use kill -9 to kill the winedevice.exe and steam processes (or rebooot) to use Steam again.

I'm using the steam-1.0.0.78-1.fc38.i686 RPM on Fedora 38, I've tried both the negativo17.org RPM and the RPMFusion RPM, with the same results.

I get the same results with Proton Experimental, and Proton 8 and Proton 7. I've switched to the Steam Beta client, but still get the same results.

If I install the Steam flatpak from flathub and give it access to my Steam library (so I don't have to download RDR2 again) then I can successfully launch RDR2, install the Rockstar Launcher, and play the game. The flatpak is version 1.0.0.75, so a slightly older version, I don't know if that's why it works. I read online that the latest client is causing this issue with RDR2 for other people too. It also plays perfectly on my Steam Deck.

I changed the game to use Proton 6.3-8 and then launching the game appears to get a further, opening a "Launching Red Dead Redemption 2" popup that shows "Processing Vulkan shaders (xx%)" but after that finishes Steam thinks the game is running (The "Play" button changes to "Stop") but nothing appears. Now if I switch back to Proton 7 or 8 or experimental, it also seems to start, switching the "Play" button to "Stop" ... but no game window appears.

Reproduction

Install steam on Fedora 38 using RPMFusion RPM, then start Steam, install RDR2, and click "Play".