Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: theHunter: Call of the Wild
• Steam AppID of the game: 518790

System Information

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, 8 GiB VRAM
• Driver/LLVM version: NVIDIA 610.43.02
• Kernel version: 7.0.10-arch1-1
• Link to full system information report: attached nvidia-bug-report.log.gz
• Proton version: Proton Experimental experimental-11.0-20260609
• Steam package: steam 1.0.0.85-7
• Desktop/session: KDE Plasma Wayland
• Plasma: plasma-desktop 6.6.5-1
• KWin: kwin 6.6.5-3

Symptoms

When running theHunter: Call of the Wild through Steam Proton and alt-tabbing out of the game, system RAM usage grows until the kernel OOM killer terminates the game. This reproduced twice in the same boot.

The issue appears during or shortly after display/window transitions. The Proton log shows repeated DXVK/Vulkan swapchain recreation around the alt-tab event:

Presenter: Got VK_SUBOPTIMAL_KHR, recreating swapchain
Presenter: Got VK_ERROR_OUT_OF_DATE_KHR, recreating swapchain

After that, the log shows the game watchdog thread hitting an access violation and Wine synchronization timeouts:

warn:threadname:dispatch_exception Thread ID 0360 renamed to "dead_lock_watch_dog_thread"
warn:seh:dispatch_exception backtrace: --- Exception 0xc0000005.
trace:seh:dispatch_exception code=c0000005 (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION) flags=0 addr=0000000140751EDD
warn:seh:virtual_unwind backtrace: 0000000140751EDD: L"theHunterCotW_F.exe" + 0000000000751EDD.
warn:seh:virtual_unwind backtrace: 0000000140D6ED31: L"theHunterCotW_F.exe" + 0000000000D6ED31.
err:sync:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0000000005B19F60 "?" wait timed out in thread 0138, blocked by 0198, retrying (60 sec)

The kernel OOM log shows the game process consuming very large RSS values.

First OOM:

Jun 14 16:44:21
Out of memory: Killed process 3584 (theHunterCotW_F)
total-vm:39693176kB
anon-rss:5780940kB
file-rss:22074688kB
shmem-rss:9276kB

Second OOM:

Jun 14 17:00:42
Out of memory: Killed process 14529 (theHunterCotW_F)
total-vm:38257996kB
anon-rss:6531516kB
file-rss:20663360kB
shmem-rss:7840kB

During the second OOM, related processes in the same Steam cgroup were also killed:

Out of memory: Killed process 15468 (dead_lock_watch)
Out of memory: Killed process 13051 (steamwebhelper)

The first OOM also produced NVIDIA kernel module allocation failures:

nv_alloc_system_pages+0x6e6/0x730 [nvidia]
nv_alloc_pages+0x111/0x210 [nvidia]
osAllocPagesInternal+0x302/0x680 [nvidia]
memdescAlloc+0x328/0xde0 [nvidia]
sysmemConstruct_IMPL+0x40c/0xd12 [nvidia]
NVRM: GPU0 _iovaspaceCreateMappingDataFromMemDesc: failed to allocate 0x20028 bytes for IOVA mapping metadata
NVRM: GPU0 nvAssertFailedNoLog: Assertion failed: status == NV_OK @ mem_desc.c:4313
NVRM: GPU0 nvCheckOkFailedNoLog: Check failed: Out of memory [NV_ERR_NO_MEMORY] (0x00000051) returned from _memdescAllocInternal(pMemDesc) @ mem_desc.c:1338
NVRM: GPU0 nvCheckOkFailedNoLog: Check failed: Out of memory [NV_ERR_NO_MEMORY] (0x00000051) returned from rmStatus @ system_mem.c:353

Reproduction

1. Start Steam.
2. Launch theHunter: Call of the Wild with Proton Experimental.
3. Alt-tab out of the game to the desktop.
4. Watch system RAM usage grow until the system is under memory pressure and the kernel OOM killer terminates the game.

Expected

Alt-tabbing should not cause runaway system RAM growth or an OOM kill.

Actual

System RAM usage rises until the kernel OOM killer kills the game. The issue reproduced twice.

Attachments

I can provide these logs:

• steam-518790-oom-2026-06-14-170042.log
• kernel-log-oom-2026-06-14.log
• nvidia-bug-report.log.gz