protonscr

DOOM intermittently crashes when Steam Overlay is opened

steamopen appid 20163rd party gameoverlayProton
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#12026 · opened 2025-05-19 by alasky17 · updated 2025-10-27 · 2 comments · github · game page · search this game
Aalasky17 2025-05-19 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): 1745876290 (Steam Deck Stable), 1747629660 (Steam Deck Beta), 1745876290 (Desktop stable client)
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): SteamOS Stable 3.6.24 in desktop mode, Ubuntu 22.04, Arch with Gnome+X11
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: Tried both
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
  • Steam Logs: steam-logs-doom.tar.gz
  • GPU: Steam Deck AMD GPU and Nvidia GeForce 3060 RTX
  • Proton version: Crash happens on all Proton 10 versions (Proton 10.0-1f, experimental-bleeding-edge-10.0-19943-20250519

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

DOOM (2016) (appid: 379720) is often crashing when the steam overlay is opened. This appears to be a race and is very likely to happen with Proton 10 - we have not yet been able to reproduce with Proton 9. When the overlay is opened, the game will often freeze (and can only be recovered by forcibly quitting) on Arch. On Ubuntu, the game will often crash completely.

In our testing, the freeze is intermittent and the rate of reproduction varies between different hardware. I found it is extremely consistent in desktop mode on the deck so I've used that as the example steps to reproduce below. We were also able to reproduce the crash/freeze on Ubuntu in windowed mode.

@gofman did some initial triaging and grabbed a backtrace of the X error from gdb (going through overlay renderer): DOOM-overlay-backtrace.txt

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Go to desktop mode on Steam Deck and plug in external keyboard (or use regular desktop - crash still happens, but more intermittently).
  2. Launch DOOM (2016)
  3. Go to Campaign -> select game slot -> Settings -> Video and select Fullscreen with 4:3 aspect ratio and 640x480 resolution.
  4. For best chance of triggering crash -- relaunch game and use shift+tab to open the Steam Overlay while the dev logo videos play.
DDevnol 2025-10-27 github

Occurs here too, Framework 13 AMD Ryzen 7 350 (when asked for lib32-vulkan drivers I picked lib32-vulkan-radeon from pacman). Arch Linux with KDE + Wayland. Proton Hotfix-20251003-fft-ivalice.
Game resolution is 1920x1080.

Game becomes instantly unresponsive while music continues playing. Steam client also no longer responds to input unless game process is terminated.

DDevnol 2025-10-27 github

Issue also occurs using Proton Experimental-10.0-20251023
Game works fine when using Proton 9.0-4

Two things I noticed are that in exp/hotfix the "Press Shift+tab to open overlay" popup when starting the game does not show up at all, whereas in 9.0-4 it shows up fine and the overlay is fully functional.

Also if you hit shift+tab before the game goes through the loading screens, the loading screens will progress like normal (bethesda, id, zenimax and epilepsy warning) and the game will lock up upon reaching the game loading phase (red circle top right). If you don't hit shift tab at any point game seems to play like normal.

Proton versions