Weird freezing on Wolfenstein: The New Order. Only on desktop, not Steam Deck. Is Valve interested in a bug report?
I'm on Kubuntu 24.04, rocking a build that was pretty darn high end in 2021 with an AMD 6800 XT, and of course, Wolfenstein: The New Order was already old news by then. Proton does miracles, but this game freezes my entire machine. The last time I saw something like this happen was with Monster Hunter World in 2018, on a much older version of Proton. I can reliably get the game to freeze my machine in the opening level of The New Order, even across multiple versions of Proton, even with the renderapi launch parameter that should switch it back to OpenGL. Of course, even if I report this to Steam support, they'll tell me that they only support Steam Deck and not bespoke Linux desktops, and the game works fine on my Steam Deck, but would they be interested in some logs and a bug reported against the GitHub project? This is assuming no one here has an easy fix, of course. But if not, how would I get the logs? I wouldn't know what I'm looking at in those logs, personally. I'm also not sure if they'll write out correctly. Because it freezes the entire machine, I end up having to hard shut down the computer by the power button, and once or twice during my experiments, it failed to mount my game SSD (a separate drive from where my OS is installed) at boot, and I had to set up the automatic mount in the partition manager again. So assuming that doesn't impact the ability to write out the logs, I can collect them with some instructions, if you kind strangers in the know wouldn't mind providing them, please. And if Valve is interested in looking at them.
I understand the nature of troubleshooting, but I don't think testing a 45 GB game is feasible off of a live distro, and any way to test it on my hardware outside of logs is a whole lot of work to get one game working; I don't have a spare drive around either. I just figured these errors would mean something to someone who could take action on it to make a better Proton for everyone. I haven't checked the kernel yet, but my version of mesa matches the latest stable version in your link.
EDIT: I did find this link that sounds like it's a mesa bug. I'm on the same major version but a different minor version.
FYI
Since AMD GFX works out of the box and steam is preinstalled in some live distro’s… simply mounting the hard drive with the game and then adding it to steam will work. Allows you to add the game ( steamlibrary) without having to download. Just a thought.
Thanks, I'll give it a try, probably over the weekend with Nobara.
EDIT: In case anyone finds this later, I just tested this with Nobara 40 and had a similar result. Nobara was on kernel 6.10 compared to my 6.8. The game ran fine from beginning to end on SteamOS with a custom kernel branched off of 6.1.52. I'm still operating under the assumption that this is a mesa bug. I don't have another machine to test this with and rule out hardware issues, but this is the information I collected, and besides, it's the only game exhibiting problems for me at this point in time.
EDIT to that EDIT: The New Order didn't run perfectly from beginning to end, I just remembered. It crashed back to the SteamOS menu once and hard froze much like my desktop once, but even that freeze was gracefully caught well enough that I could still use the Steam menu to force quit the program, unlike my experience on desktop.