I have the same thing, and I was doing some testing just now. At first, I would see SteamVR crash and the game window on the desktop be stuck on the loading screen. The headset is stuck on a black screen.
After switching to the SteamVR beta, it got further. I now see SteamVR crash, but the game seems to load into the next scene. Specifically, it gets past the loading screen, then the spectator HUD is visible against a back screen, then the environment of the next area is visible behind the HUD. The headset is stuck on the loading scene. At this point, I got a new save in the next area, but loading into that straight from the main menu still fails.
I was looking through logs and couldn't find any clues until I checked the kernel log (dmesg) and saw a bunch of errors that correlate with my crashes during the testing I described: https://gist.github.com/her001/f21e27d71371efa41ae849b522982389
Seems that there are GPU resets with amdgpu/Mesa as part of the problem on my end. I'm on Linux 6.18.5 and Mesa 25.3.3.
Recently tried HL:A again and I run into the same problem. My GPU resets successfully so I only get the Steam Vr crash with a black HMD but the game successfully transistions into the next zone.
Edit: Now that Im in the QZ the game also crashes on loading a save.
The crash seems to have something to do with the map overlay that's shown during level load.
I can reproduce this on Arch Linux with a Valve Index and an AMD RX 9070 XT.
Every Half-Life: Alyx level transition crashes SteamVR. For example, I selected Chapter 3 directly, played it
normally, and SteamVR crashed at the transition to Chapter 4. Earlier it also crashed on the Chapter 2 transition.
System:
The compositor initializes normally, detects the Index at both 120 Hz and 90 Hz, and SteamVR Home works. Alyx runs
normally inside a level; the failure occurs specifically on level transitions.
At each failure, vrcompositor aborts from WaitForPresent, followed by an AMDGPU gfx-ring timeout and reset:
Fri Jul 24 2026 17:35:35 [Info] - Failed Watchdog timeout in thread Render in WaitForPresent after 5.602151 seconds.
Aborting.
amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: [drm] AMDGPU device coredump file has been created
amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout, signaled seq=21545132, emitted seq=21545134
amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: Process vrcompositor pid 49483 thread RenderThread pid 49533
amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: Starting gfx_0.0.0 ring reset
amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: Ring gfx_0.0.0 reset succeeded
amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: [drm] device wedged, but no recovery needed
steamvr-logs-2026-07-24.tar.gz
EDIT - The issue can be worked around by the methods noted in this reddit thread
Nothing extracted yet.
Describe the bug
On the native linux build and all proton versions for Half-Life:Alyx, there is a crash that occurs during all level transitions which causes the computer to freeze for ~15 minutes in my experiences and subsequently all drivers (Related to VR) crash and are forced to restart
To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:
Expected behavior
The game to load into a new level without a hitch as it was doing it perfectly fine only a few months ago.
System Information (please complete the following information):
Please use the latest Steam beta client and SteamVR beta for your bug reports!
tar -zcvf ~/Desktop/steam- logs.tar.gz ~/.steam/steam/logs] Command Failedtar -zcvf ~/Desktop/steam-minidumps.tar.gz /tmp/dumps]steam-minidumps.tar.gz
Screenshots
If applicable, add screenshots to help explain your problem.
Additional context
I have already asked steam support about this and they deflected my issue a couple times until they said I don't meet minimum requirements which I do. (I have an rx 7600 and a ryzen 7 5700x.)