Proton Log was having issues attaching.
This one is where it silent CTD which happens all the time. Other then that the game runs fine.

protonlog.zip

ALMOST forgot to mention. Game CTD but steam shows it still running, however I can't find the process.

I have been using GAMESCOPE and HDR. Going to Test without. Perhaps this is GS issue.

Tested without gamescope, and it appears to not crash.

So I will need to investigate about gamescope, as atm its only way HDR works under Plasma.

I've tried a few things now and without much luck. The CTD is a bit random, normally it happens after 20mins but sometimes it will happen within 30s of play.

UPDATE: Looks like this is 100% a gamescope issue. It seems other people are using gamescope pretty well with HDR but for me, random ctd.

It seems the game doesn't save shaders cache and every launch it takes ~30mins (on Windows it takes 20 mins the first time and 5 mins afterwards). Could this be an issue in Mesa?

Operating System: Arch Linux
Kernel Version: 6.11.7-lqx1-2-lqx (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D 8-Core Processor
Memory: 31.3 ГіБ of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

This is not a issue for NVIDIA owners. First time is like maybe 5mins, after that is around 15-20seconds.

UPDATE: Actually Steam does take 20mins almost for the first vulkan shader compile time.

It seems the game doesn't save shaders cache and every launch it takes ~30mins (on Windows it takes 20 mins the first time and 5 mins afterwards). Could this be an issue in Mesa?

Operating System: Arch Linux Kernel Version: 6.11.7-lqx1-2-lqx (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D 8-Core Processor Memory: 31.3 ГіБ of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

Fixed by setting MESA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE=10G env parameter

@jarrard what gamescope version are you using, and have you tried to use gamescope without HDR to see if it also crashes?

@jarrard what gamescope version are you using, and have you tried to use gamescope without HDR to see if it also crashes?

I posted over in the gamescope issue tracker here (with versions) https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/1633

I do believe it still crashes without HDR enabled, however I should test it again just to be sure which I'll do now.

UPDATE: Decided to reinstall with CachyOS since its been a while and my system was setup for a virtual machine originally which I no longer use atm. Anyway solved a couple minor issues such as kwin crashing and also a keybind bug related with wayland windows (likely related to kwin_wayland crashes).

HOWEVER the underlining crash to desktop with WSI and HDR enabled via gamescope still occurs sadly. Took around 30mins or so to happen this time around thought. I'll test without HDR now and see how long it lasts for.

Just confirmed, Crashes still with HDR disabled (--hdr-enable not used) and HDR turned off in game.

So this seems to be a issue with Gamescope, shame that tool has so many issues.

On my system game works but on log i have same warnings!

Proton log:
steam-1643320.zip

System: Arch Linux kernel 6.12, KDE plasma 6.2.3, 1440p resolution at 165 Hz, Ryzen 7800x3D, 32 GB ram DDR5 6000 Mhz dual channel, RX 7900 XT 20 GB, playing on maximum settings epic at 1440p.

https://youtu.be/gcoUmZYCsZE

Yes I have seen that people reporting no issues on protondb and using gamescope.

~I suspect this is a specific problem linked with Plasma6.2 or some other latest core software version.~

~It's still most likely a NVIDIA related issue!~

Issue is resolved by this patch that is in master. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/pull/1630

I don't use a controller atm so can't test.

anyone got any kind of controller working?

This game feels like 2x smoother under Windows11 for some reason. The fps different is only around 30fps (linux 90fps at 4k, windows 120ish) but boy does it feel SO DAMN GOOD under win11 compared to Linux.

I don't know what the issue is. Bit of a shame, I'll have to play this under Win11 until something can be figured out, perhaps its the frame-gen just working so much better under Windows, that's probably it.

UPDATE: So I installed some performance mods and also turned off cpu mitigation and that seems to have helped a bit. Acceptable anyway under Linux.
If someone needs MORE fps then another thing to try is just running it all under X11 instead of Wayland because according to the Arch wiki WL can eat up as much as %16 of your performance. Worth a try.

UPDATE: So I installed some performance mods and also turned off cpu mitigation and that seems to have helped a bit. Acceptable anyway under Linux. If someone needs MORE fps then another thing to try is just running it all under X11 instead of Wayland because according to the Arch wiki WL can eat up as much as %16 of your performance. Worth a try.

Just to add to that I've been playing on X11 and I have a similar feeling regarding smoothness AND fps compared to windows (10 not 11 in my case)

Has anyone been to The Slag Heap and talked to Richtor on top of the crane (very top of, sneaky way to get there)?

Well the tree lines are artefacting and also the buildings in distance have this pop-in issue for me.

Could be game itself (if so then its BAD) or could be proton, could be nvidia, could be settings.

Anyone get a weird bounded mouse issue when playing in a gamescope session? It's like the mouse hits the screen edge and can't continue, so you can only look at like a 45 degree arc in front of you. Tried with and without --force-grab-cursor, works fine outside an embedded session.

Hmmm, you could try usetakefocus to disabled or enabled. That is a WINE config thing, forgot how to set it but I believe protontricks has it in one of its options.

Hmmm, you could try usetakefocus to disabled or enabled. That is a WINE config thing, forgot how to set it but I believe protontricks has it in one of its options.

Does not appear to work.

I'm struggling with a issue where the game randomly begins to frame skip, you can tell when it happens as it goes from smooth to choppy. The framerate is mostly unaffected, only restarting game fixes it. Probably another nvidia gamescope issue.

Some data below on my ASUS 4090 in comparison of linux vs windows. As you can see this game really only gets a extra %50 more frames with frame-gen enabled which IMO is NOT GREAT, even under windows it only achieves this extra %50 more fps, it should be AT LEAST %70 more fps but for some reason FG is extremely inefficient in Stalker-2!

The second thing to note, Windows11 is around %20-30 faster then Linux for this title. That makes it a exceptionally not great proton experience atm.

Lastly it MAY be possible to resolve the gamescope stutter by enabling steam-overlay, for some reason when its disabled it can cause some sort of background dependency check loop which MAY be the culprit for the Linux stutters after 10mins or so. I also enabled --immediate-flips for gamescope but I doubt that did anything.

Linux 4K
|FPS Values|
Base - No Upscaling or FG : ~46
Upscaling (FSR/DLSS) Quality : ~67
FSR3 Frame-Gen : ~67 (doesn't work)
DLSS-FG : ~98

Windows 4K
|FPS Values|
Base - No Upscaling or FG : ~67
Upscaling (FSR/DLSS) Quality : ~85
FSR3 Frame-Gen : not-relevant
DLSS-FG : ~116

[FPS results taken from the top of tall guard tower at start after 3rd scan scene]

It seems the game doesn't save shaders cache and every launch it takes ~30mins (on Windows it takes 20 mins the first time and 5 mins afterwards). Could this be an issue in Mesa?

Operating System: Arch Linux Kernel Version: 6.11.7-lqx1-2-lqx (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D 8-Core Processor Memory: 31.3 ГіБ of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

me and some one ik that uses windows has this same long compile time with this game

It seems the game doesn't save shaders cache and every launch it takes ~30mins (on Windows it takes 20 mins the first time and 5 mins afterwards). Could this be an issue in Mesa?
Operating System: Arch Linux Kernel Version: 6.11.7-lqx1-2-lqx (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D 8-Core Processor Memory: 31.3 ГіБ of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

Fixed by setting MESA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE=10G env parameter

I cannot get this to work under Fedora. Have tried under the game options in steam and via ~/.config/environment.d/.conf, as well as with MESA_SHADER_CACHE_DISABLE=false, the .cache/mesa_shader_cache* dirs never exceed 500mb.

controller problem & solution

stalker 2 is one of the few games that uses gameinput, gameinput is a new api that is still not widely used that replaces xinput but has not yet been implemented on wine, it is not a bug in stalker 2 that the controller does not work on proton.

solution: i wrote a compatibility layer that can convert gameinput api to xinput api to allow the controller to work on proton., It implements a small part of gameinput but should be sufficent to be able to play without too much problems.

just download the dll, place to "Stalker2/Binaries/Win64/gameinput.dll" and change launch options to WINEDLLOVERRIDES="gameinput=n,b" %command%

https://github.com/andrew-ld/gameinput2xinput/releases

me and some one ik that uses windows has this same long compile time with this game

There are mods now that disable this compiling, check them out in Nexusmods, I think they could be mostly just INI tweaks so you can do them yourself.

I cannot get this to work under Fedora. Have tried under the game options in steam and via ~/.config/environment.d/.conf, as well as with MESA_SHADER_CACHE_DISABLE=false, the .cache/mesa_shader_cache* dirs never exceed 500mb.

MESA dafault is 1GB, if your folder takes 500MB, then this is not the problem. My folder was 1GB

Game slightly stutters after 45 minute / 1 hour mark. On RTX 4070 with nvidia 565.57.01 driver and Linux kernel 6.11.10. Similar reports are also present on ProtonDB.

This seems to have been created by the recent patch 1.0.2, as before (1.0 and 1.0.1) the situation was fine.

Update 16 December 2024: Upon additional research, it seems that Linux kernel 6.11 introduced an issue with NVIDIA drivers in every game, where the stuttering happens around the 1-hour mark of gameplay. It seems that some functions have been changed, which work fine on 6.10.10, yet afterwards they are not recognised by the NVIDIA driver attempting to make the calls, and thus failing. The FPS itself is unaffected, and displays as normal, despite the stutter.

I don't have any stutter issue, thought I am using some performance/config mods that are meant to reduce or eliminate that issue. UE5 is a prickly beast when it comes to optimal configuration.

I've taken that gameinput.dll tool that was written by andrew-ld and added impulse trigger support if you're launching this through Steam. You can get a zip with the version of the DLL I've compiled here https://github.com/andrew-ld/gameinput2xinput/pull/6

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8260#issuecomment-2509483841

stalker 2 patch 1.1 need updated gameinput2input

download latest version at https://github.com/andrew-ld/gameinput2xinput/releases/tag/1.0.3

Previously game worked perfectly, but now it crashes on the start 100% times. (haven't played several patches so can't pinpoint).
Re-install, fresh prefix, any combo of launch options - all looks the same: blink of black screen then UE crash report.

Proton logs

Operating System: Arch Linux
Kernel Version: 6.18.1-arch1-2(64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X
Memory: 64 GB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE

Anyone has a solution?

for me it crashes randomly within 0-40 minutes, started after recent 1.8 patch around few days ago, on 1.7 game worked way more stable (around 2 crashes in 80 hours)

OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Kernel: Linux 6.18.2-arch2-1
DE: KDE Plasma 6.5.4
WM: KWin (Wayland)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8GiB
RAM: 32GiB

i will attach stalker 2 crash logs and proton log later, within the next 24 hours

Got proton log, played for 35 minutes and crashed.

System Information

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
• Video driver version: nvidia-open 590.48.01
• Kernel version: Linux 6.18.2-arch2-1
• Link to full system information report: https://gist.github.com/vic-bay/e67d6d791955206aa6d293d4bb98de6e
• Proton version: Experimental 1765195901 experimental-10.0-20251208

Symptoms

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 crashes randomly and frequently.

proton log:
steam-1643320.zip

and stalker 2 crash log:

UECC-Windows-833DE0464141A3B8F82E60ABF7E349B7_0000.zip

@vic-bay maybe it depends on settings or location? stayed around zalissya and no crash on my end on either my amd desktop or nvidia laptop. It'd be nice to try and narrow down conditions.

@vic-bay maybe it depends on settings or location? stayed around zalissya and no crash on my end on either my amd desktop or nvidia laptop. It'd be nice to try and narrow down conditions.

I had around 20 crashes in various locations and conditions, different weather and time of day, in the wild and camps, it doesn't seem to be any particular pattern for me. Doesn't look like a memory leak as well.

I haven't changed any settings since 1.7, where I had very stable experience. I can try testing the game with pure setup later (will nuke settings, saves, prefix).

Checked arch linux integrity, checked installed files integrity, deleted vkd3d cache and nvidia cache, started a new game with the purest setup possible (new configs, prefix). Same crash result.
Set all settings to low, except textures and shadows on medium (previous settings were everything on high, textures and shadows on medium, reflections and GI on epic).

New game on master difficulty, got crash after around 65 minutes of playtime, played through prologue to Zalissya village and the game crashed. Stalker2.log shows the same errors as it did on previous crashes. I attached proton log, and stalker 2 crash report (it also has a crash log)

steam-1643320.zip
UECC-Windows-5F9E6865411E1A2F84D76C96D42EF5A6_0000.zip

Could this be a proton version doing it?

Tried older protons or even ge/cachyos proton?

Have you tried removing pre-compiled shares in Steam itself? It helped me few times, although on AMD GPU. I'm talking about Settings -> Downloads -> All the way at the bottom "Enable Shader Pre-caching" -> Disable it -> Close Steam -> Start Steam -> Enable it.

I tried Proton-GE 10.27, the game crashed in 70 minutes.

steam-1643320.zip
UECC-Windows-71ACE3ED487F1FFB8B348F92C1D01B78_0000.zip

I switched to Proton 10 stable 1763063551 proton-10.0-3, the game didn't crash in 137 minutes and still working. The only thing I had with Proton 10, is abyssmal stutter at around 90 minutes, for around 30 seconds I witnessed a slideshow (1 frame in 5 seconds or so), and then the game got back to normal framerate.

According to steam overlay performance monitor there wasn't huge spike in VRAM or RAM usage (VRAM was at 6 out of 8 GB, and RAM was at 12GB, both are typical for my current settings: everything low, textures and shadows on medium, dlss on performance).

I will keep running the game for some more time, will attach proton.log a bit later.

Have you tried removing pre-compiled shares in Steam itself? It helped me few times, although on AMD GPU. I'm talking about Settings -> Downloads -> All the way at the bottom "Enable Shader Pre-caching" -> Disable it -> Close Steam -> Start Steam -> Enable it.

I don't use precompiled shaders at all.

With stable Proton: 1763063551 proton-10.0-3 the game crashed after 3.5 hours of playtime.

steam-1643320.zip
UECC-Windows-F1A44D7940CE0A9E33BD2DA913CB1648_0000.zip

100 minutes session, starting from the start of the game, low graphics preset, 590.48.01 nvidia open drivers, but with a 4060m card and proton experimental. Still no crash on my end.

So for now it looks like proton 10 is working better for you, but if you only ran it once there's always the chance it was a fluke given the variability in your previous crashes, though still not ideal given that it still crashes in the end, it would still be good to confirm that it works better with a second attempt.

If you check sudo dmesg after the game crashes, are there any nvidia logs on it? More recent logs appear at the bottom.

there are two entries in dmesg output that have time matching crash times
[ 5333.318669] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:08:00): 109, pid=5089, name=GameThread, channel 0x00000046, errorString CTX SWITCH TIMEOUT, Info 0x9c04f

[20733.378580] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:08:00): 109, pid=8126, name=GameThread, channel 0x0000004c, errorString CTX SWITCH TIMEOUT, Info 0x58c057

downgraded nvidia driver from 590.48.01 to 580.119.02, and hadn't a single crash since even with proton experimental. just finished running the game for 505 minutes (8.5 hours) in one continuous session. did a lot of traversal through almost the entire world, on foot and via fast travel.

Big perf delta on nvidia vs Windows, similar to @jarrard , but no crashes. Shader compilation doing a small bit of work at every boot seems to happen on Windows as well, looks to be unrelated to vkd3d. I can't enable DLSS FG on Linux.

Tested as of game version 1.7

Screenshots of overlays, about 40% more FPS on Windows

This is the same game folder, same AppData/Local, on Win 11 576.88. 4K DLSS Quality, Preset K (through optiscaler). Also with

[SystemSettings]
r.OneFrameThreadLag=0

Without that setting, I found the input latency (at least on Linux, where I set the game up first) unbearable.

downgraded nvidia driver from 590.48.01 to 580.119.02, and hadn't a single crash since even with proton experimental. just finished running the game for 505 minutes (8.5 hours) in one continuous session. did a lot of traversal through almost the entire world, on foot and via fast

Did you rollback os? Or only downgraded the driver?

downgraded nvidia driver from 590.48.01 to 580.119.02, and hadn't a single crash since even with proton experimental. just finished running the game for 505 minutes (8.5 hours) in one continuous session. did a lot of traversal through almost the entire world, on foot and via fast

Did you rollback os? Or only downgraded the driver?

I downgraded only specific packages

warning: lib32-nvidia-utils: ignoring package upgrade (580.119.02-1 => 590.48.01-1)
warning: linux: ignoring package upgrade (6.18.1.arch1-2 => 6.18.3.arch1-1)
warning: nvidia-open: ignoring package upgrade (580.119.02-2 => 590.48.01-4)
warning: nvidia-utils: ignoring package upgrade (580.119.02-1 => 590.48.01-1)

linux complained about missing modules during mkinitcpio kernel image building, so I downgraded it as well, but considering package changes on archlinux repos, not much was changed since.
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/linux/-/compare/6.18.1.arch1-2...main?from_project_id=42594

same issue. 5070ti/9800x3d/CachyOS. Worked fine before last stalker patch. Only works with Reflections on low. Downgrade to 580 drivers and can run everything on epic again

I have been able to get the game running well on the latest update with the following launch options:

MESA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE=10G PROTON_NO_STEAMINPUT=1 PROTON_VKD3D_HEAP=1 PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE=1 PROTON_LOCAL_SHADER_CACHE=1 %command%

My configuration:

• OS: NixOS
• GPU: RTX 5070 Ti
• Video driver version: Nvidia 595.58.03
• Kernel version: 6.19.9-cachyos (https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/kernel/)
• Proton version: cachyos-10.0-20260330-slr

Just an FYI, as of April 2026, I still need andrew-ld's gameinput dll workaround for my Xbox Elite 2 controller to not have issues in the menus when streaming over Sunshine + Moonlight. Also, as of recent patches for me the game had been crashing on launch and PROTON_USE_VKD3D_HEAP=1 with CachyOS' Proton seems to fix it.

@andrew-ld pinging you to let you know your dll is still necessary (at least in my setup).

Version 11 of Proton is quite unstable and crashes; sometimes it fails to compile shaders.

Version 9.0-4b works perfectly.

Video driver version: 580.126.09

Version 11 of Proton is quite unstable and crashes; sometimes it fails to compile shaders.

Version 9.0-4b works perfectly.

Video driver version: 580.126.09

works great on the newest proton-cachy

Version 11 of Proton is quite unstable and crashes; sometimes it fails to compile shaders.
Version 9.0-4b works perfectly.
Video driver version: 580.126.09

works great on the newest proton-cachy

Yes, it seems to be working perfectly now (using Proton 11.0 (Beta)).

It might have been because the new version was just installed and seems unstable.

Hello, I installed STALKER 2 on Bazzite a few months ago and I have lighting issues. This is a rendering bug, not a crash.

Quick summary

Lighting blows out on movement in game no matter the Nvidia driver or Proton version. 71 compute pipelines fail with error code 0x80070057. This occurs 100% of the time.

Specs and environment

OS : Bazzite 43 with KDE Wayland ; Kernel 6.17.7-ba29.fc43.x86_64
CPU : AMD 7800X3D
GPU : RTX 4080 (MSI SUPRIM X)
Nvidia drivers : 595.58.03 ; I have also tested with 580.x, same problem. 590.x made STALKER 2 crash anyway.
Proton versions I tried :

• Proton Experimental
• Proton 10.0-4
• Proton 11 (beta)
• Proton-GE latest (probably 10.34)
• Proton-CachyOS latest (probably 10.0-20260424-slr).

Shader cache in ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/shadercache/1643320 was cleared before each attempt.

Symptoms

Once the game finishes loading, lighting is OK :

I can move the camera using the mouse, no problem. But once I start moving, then the lighting becomes very bright. Here is a comparison between the Windows 11 version (darker one) and the Bazzite version (full lights on) :

Here is the Windows 11 version on the same computer for reference :

Debug and logs

So I went and took a look at the Stalker2.log file and got this (this is for Proton 11 but I got the same across all Proton versions, I can produce another one if you wish) : Stalker2-Proton11.log

The 71 errors at the end bothered me so I activated Proton logs and warning for vk3d using PROTON_LOG=1 VKD3D_DEBUG=warn DXVK_LOG_LEVEL=warn launch arguments. This produced a whopping 22 MB log file and among them was this kind of errors :

17129.196:014c:02c0:warn:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_pipeline_state_init_compute: Failed to create Vulkan compute pipeline, hr 0x80070057.

Full list : all-compute-errors.txt

There are 71 of them, just like the number of errors in Stalker2.log, so I figured that was the issue. Hopefully this is helpful.

I can provide the full 22 MB log file, or run other commands or extract some more logs ; just let me know.

@GTechene Hi there.
Does this issue only show in that specific location in the game or is it in general? Also is it tied to any graphical settings?

Hi @Blisto91 ! It's general, but especially remarkable indoors.
I have tried many different graphical settings, especially ones related to DLSS (quality, framegen on/off, etc...) or anti-aliasing. I haven't tried everything though, so if you can think of a setting (or combination of settings) that could fix this behaviour, tell me so I can try.