Intro

Hello friends,

I’ve been hearing mixed things about Starfield, so I thought I’d try experiencing it myself. Before you ask “why aren’t you running Starfield with Steam’s Proton Experimental or Proton-GE” let’s say I went out sailing yesterday and met a fellow legitimate sailor who was giving many people a great discount on the game. Getting back to port, the sea was rough were quite a few torrents crashing against the cliff faces that evening.

I’ve tried various various environment flags to get the game working, but nothing seems to work. I even made sure the installation of lutris-GE-Proton8-14 had the most up-to-date version of VKD3D. I checked the winecfg for that version of wine and it’s has the correct Windows version and all of that. Manually running the game with the wine executable in that version of wine with the WINEPREFIX set to where that’s install for Lutris gives me a few interesting lines.

As of note, the game does, erm, “launch” in that it creates a new window for Starfield, but it’s all black and stays that way.

First interesting lines

01b8:err:setupapi:create_dest_file failed to create L"C:\\windows\\system32\\d3d12.dll" (error=80)
wine: configuration in L"/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64" has been updated.

Okay? But the configuration for wine shouldn’t be updating, for one, and running the setup script provided by VKD3D-Proton gets me the following:

setup_vkd3d_proton.sh install --symlink
wine: configuration in L"/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64" has been updated.
wine: configuration in L"/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64" has been updated.
removed '/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/d3d12.dll'
'/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/d3d12.dll' -> '/usr/lib/vkd3d-proton/x64/d3d12.dll'
removed '/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/syswow64/d3d12.dll'
'/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/syswow64/d3d12.dll' -> '/usr/lib/vkd3d-proton/x86/d3d12.dll'
removed '/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/d3d12core.dll'
'/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/d3d12core.dll' -> '/usr/lib/vkd3d-proton/x64/d3d12core.dll'
removed '/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/syswow64/d3d12core.dll'
'/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/syswow64/d3d12core.dll' -> '/usr/lib/vkd3d-proton/x86/d3d12core.dll'

So I don’t know why the wine configuration is being updated again.

Next interesting lines

163756.705:01d4:031c:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.711:01d4:0314:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.755:01d4:031c:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.758:01d4:030c:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.761:01d4:0334:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.762:01d4:0334:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.768:01d4:0344:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.769:01d4:0334:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.

I don’t know what this means or if it’s what would cause my issue, but since it repeated several times I’m assuming it’s something worth noting.

Final Thoughts and System Info

I could just be having issues due to getting that discount from my fellow sailor, but I wouldn’t know. I’m very skeptical, mainly because “Your drivers are out of date” is so specific.

System Info

I’m on Gentoo, a hardened profile on Linux Kernel 6.1.46.

I’m currently on Mesa version 23.2.0_rc3.

I’m on the master/main branch for the xf86-video-amdgpu driver.

If there’s anything other system info I can provide that will help me fix this, let me know.

EDIT

Add it as a Non-Steam game in Steam and it’ll work there with Proton-GE 8.14. Unfortunately, given this is a Bethesda game, your performance will vary likely until 2-3 patches later. I have the following launch options, some probably aren’t necessary:

PROTON_LOG=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR_STRENGTH=1 gamemodeun %command% --skip-launcher

Stay safe, fellow Linux gamers and sailors. 🫡