Summary
The game environment (world geometry, terrain, skybox) renders correctly, but character and object models fail to load/render entirely. The game itself starts and runs (no crash), but is unplayable with models missing.
Log Evidence
The following warning repeats continuously in the Proton log during gameplay:
warn: DxvkMemoryAllocator::createImageResource: Failed to open shared NT handle
This appears at high frequency (tens of repeats per second) for the duration of the session.

Steps Taken to Rule Out Local Causes
Cleared all shader caches (Steam shadercache, Mesa shader cache, NVIDIA GLCache) — issue persisted.
Fully deleted and regenerated the Proton compatdata prefix from scratch — issue persisted.
Tested on two different Proton builds: GE-Proton11-3 and proton-cachyos-11.0-20260703-slr — same result on both.
Tried VKD3D_CONFIG=descriptor_heap,enable_experimental_features PROTON_VKD3D_HEAP=1 launch options (relevant to a separate, unrelated D3D12/vkd3d-proton crash issue on RTX 50-series cards) — no effect, as expected, since this warning originates in DXVK (D3D11 path), not vkd3d-proton (D3D12 path).
Confirmed NVIDIA driver (580.173.02) is well below the 595.x branch associated with other unrelated Crimson Desert issues on newer NVIDIA architectures.

Software information

Crimson Desert,
run as non-steam game,
launch options:VKD3D_CONFIG=descriptor_heap,enable_experimental_features PROTON_VKD3D_HEAP=1 PROTON_LOG=1 %command%.

System information

• GPU:1080 Ti,
• Driver:580.173.02
• Wine version: wine-11.0 (CachyOS)
• DXVK version: v3.0.2-2-g0ff9cd328ca23b4

Log files

crimson-desert-trimmed.log