Here's how to get The Witcher 3 working on Steam Deck after the next-gen update

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: NerdNoiseRadio

Quoting: BlackBloodRum

Quoting: einherjarIt worries me a bit, everytime I read "how to get xy to work again on Steamdeck".

If it does not become a "just works" experience, it will fail over time.

You can't really blame Linux for this. If a game was updated and it stopped working on windows, would you respond "Windows will fail if it doesn't become a just works experience"? No. You'd say the game devs need to test their game more and fix it.

My point here is that we shouldn't be so quick to blame Linux, it's perfectly possible the game is doing something weird which is breaking the compatibility. The fact is, this was just working, but the devs updated it, which has broken it.

We're not physic and we don't have access to the next update, so we can't "fix it" before it's released. Only the game devs could do that.

It seems to me that he wasn't blaming Linux, but blaming Steam Deck - which to be fair, is the buggiest game system I've ever played on a whole host of fronts.

Now, three important caveats:

1) I don't blame Linux either.

2) in terms of Valve issuing a steady stream of fixes, reducing the impact of bugs, Steam Deck has come a LONG way since I first got my device in April, and I have confidence that it will only continue to further improve and hopefully still at the same quick speed with which it has been happening so far.

3) Even with all the above standing, I still regard the Deck as my favorite (or certainly at the very least, my "most esteemed") system of all. I've purchased something like 100 new Steam games since April, while purchasing zero new games for XBox Series X, or Switch (which had been my main system prior), and -maybe- one game for PS5 (can't remember if this game was purchased just before or just after I got the Deck). I've also produced an episode of the podcast from it in desktop mode. I love the thing!

But even so, ein's point, which I will [hopefully faithfully] paraphrase as "the bugs will eventually erode esteem, then confidence, and finally willingness, leading to an eventual die-off for the device", I think rings 100% true!

Even with as highly as I regard it myself, I will confess to having found multiple instances where I ended up deciding against a quick play session because of anxiety over whether or not that quick play session would be spent futzing with dropped (or scrambled) controller connections while docked, or a frequent game-breaking blinking screen issue while docked, or a game just deciding not to load....or hell, even something so simple as a game I've set to run in 1080p or higher while docked just "automagically" deciding to run in 800p for no good reason and not letting me kick it back up without having to reboot the device...and so on, and so on, and so on.

With a grabby, budding gamer of a toddler, I don't get much opportunity to play undocked unless I'm out of the house or it's after his bedtime, and so for that reason, plus an "I would just prefer to play docked in a vacuum anyway", I do most of my Steam Decking docked, which has been a joy when it works right, and a nightmare when it doesn't...and I've experienced more than my fair share of both.

My enthusiasm for the thing, and all its myriad freedoms and potentials leaves me with a huge bank of goodwill towards it. But if that bank continues to only deplete a little each and every time I go to use it (or decide not to even try for those same reasons), it will eventually, inevitably run out, where the Switch, for all the ways that it's outclassed, and outshined by this thing, and for all the ways I outright hate the evil corporate entity behind it....always "just works"...may someday lead to a situation where I just start reaching for that controller again instead.

In short, I think ein is 100% right. If it's impacting even someone like me who is so passionate about the thing, it'll certainly impact the people so much less passionate than me. And this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Linux.

Of course, the saving grace here is that I still do not believe this eventuality to be "inevitable", or even necessarily "likely", as Valve already has a tremendous track record of improving all these issues as we go, and at least at this juncture, I still maintain a healthy optimism that this trend will only continue. It sucks that the glory has been smeared coming out of the gate, but I'm still reasonably confident that we'll get there before it manages to kills itself off, or turn people like me off to it.

Cheers!

What I find peculiar, about the state of The Witcher 3, is witnessing all the work CDPR as put into CP2077 to support the Steam Deck and coming to the realization that it doesn't seem to transpose to The Witcher 3. That's why I'm hopeful something is in the work between Valve and CDPR to solve the issue; they seem to work closely when such things happen. It's just that it should have been worked out before release. Unfortunately for the Steam Deck, the PC gaming market will not wait for such issues to be solved.

Sure. And that's the trade off with PC gaming in general, isn't it? Much more freedom, much more flexibility, and generally speaking, much more horsepower (though, with the Steam Deck, that's only really true vs the Switch, or at the very most, vs the base XB1 / PS4), at the expense of much less convenience, and fluidity / reliability of operation (aka, much less "it just works"). And though the Steam Deck looks, feels, and presents itself like a handheld console, it is, technically, a computer instead - a less powerful (though commensurately less expensive) gaming laptop in a console-like shell, which, if you're going to "game more than compute" is probably the superior form-factor of the two (though certainly inferior if you're going to "compute more than game").

So, in terms of my complaint in my last comment, I feel like I owe everyone a tremendous apology for introducing confusion:

I don't really hold things like "oh, Witcher 3 needs a command to make it work right" against the Steam Deck, and that's also not exactly what I meant when I said the Steam Deck will die off without fixes, though, given the context, and a lack of clarification on my part, it's perfectly reasonable if that's what was inferred. Mea culpa for not properly clarifying, and I'll further elaborate on this below.

Also, given that I think the dynamic of "freedom / flexibility / horsepower vs convenience / 'it just works'" between PC and console is something I think the broader body of gamers at large are generally aware of already, I doubt it'll turn a huge number of people off from it either, since they'd have at least a vague expectation of it coming into it - especially those coming from the PC side of the divide.

Instead, what I was on about, and what I had used the springboard of ein's comment to vent my pent-up frustrations about in the last comment was simple system issues in general, not exclusive to docked mode, but dramatically exaggerated in docked mode. Things like controllers just disconnecting, or malfunctioning (case in point, suddenly the joypads and joysticks stop working while the letter buttons keep working, or controller 1 magically becoming controller 3 at the drop of a hat mid-game, and so on). Things like arbitrarily changing and disregarding resolution settings, or games just mysteriously deciding to not boot (equally a problem docked and undocked). THOSE are the kinda things that if left unfixed, I think, eventually WILL kill the thing off through crumbling user interest and goodwill.

Or, as I had alluded to before - HDMI signal just dropping out in completely unpredictable (and often times clustered) bursts - though, this last issue, I'm hoping, is not a Steam Deck problem per se, but a problem with the cheapie 3rd party dock I'm using for it. On another [also cheapie] dock elsewhere in the house, hooked to two 1080p monitors, I have had zero signal cut out issues, while on this dock and a 4K TV, I experience the problem frequently; at least one burst of cut out events every single time I play for more than 20 minutes. Often times it gets so bad that it stops transmitting signal altogether (I.e. "no signal found" message and default wallpapers from the TV) until I unplug and replug the Deck.

Of course, I realize that 2x1080p is only half the total pixel load as 1x2160p, so it might be a permanent bandwidth issue, and nothing that can be fixed, even though I can also sometimes go a couple hours with no such events at all, which makes that explanation seem unlikely to me (and made even further unlikely given that I don't experience the issue exclusively, or even any more frequently at higher resolutions), and indeed, every time the situation has decayed to the point of "no signal found", and unplugging / replugging, I've never seemed to have it recur at all after that point for the rest of that given play session.

So it's like you just have to let it have its tantrum, cause all its chaos, and then you're fine, implying to me more of a software issue than a hardware one, which of course means a potential future fix awaits...if it's not just a bad dock to begin with, which is ultimately what I'm hoping will be the case, because it's the easiest thing to discard and replace. I know I could always test this out by a) hooking the Switch to this dock instead, and b) replacing this dock with the other dock in this 4K x 1 context to see in which contexts the symptom does or does not replicate, but I've just been too lazy to do that.

Again, my confidence level of conditions improving to the point of long-term happiness remains very high. But as things currently stand, I do worry about my passion and engagement and support gradually eroding away just a couple small crumbles at a time. Not any time soon, most likely, but barring the [admittedly likely] course corrections / mitigations, does seem to be "eventually inevitable down the long-road".

For non steam-deck users you can also run the DX11 exe directly located in "game_folder/bin/x64/witcher3.exe".

Meanwhile the DX12 exe is located in "game_folder/bin/x64_dx12/witcher3.exe".

On my Radeon RX 6700XT with the latest stable Mesa Release Haiworks is completely broken. I had to turn it off to get geralds hair rendered at all.

Well, al experimenting done I think. Ray Tracing is a no-go. Despite the terrible FPS hit, it crashes between 3-30 seconds the game becomes unresponsive (although various sounds keep on going). Without RT, performance in D3D12 mode seems good. Still locked to 60 with everything on Ultra+. The only thing I can't get working is NV Hairworks. Supposedly that can be made to work fine in DX11 by adding d3dcompiler_47.dll, but that same trick produces another lock up in DX12. So now the choice is between Ultra+ or hairworks. Now to see if there are any issues while playing.

Edit: all of this was with vkd3d-proton master from tonight. Without the fixes from today it didn't work at all.


Last edited by Ehvis on 14 December 2022 at 9:04 pm UTC

The DX12 issue seems to be fixed. Use Proton Hotfix.
Looks great with good performance thanks to FSR.

Quoting: Goggo66The DX12 issue seems to be fixed. Use Proton Hotfix.
Looks great with good performance thanks to FSR.

Concur, this worked, however I could only get raytracing options to populate if I used VVKD3D_CONFIG=dxr in the launch parameters, and the game hangs once the save loads. Without that parameter, DX12 version loads fine and FSR2 works, but DLSS does not. I'll stick to DX11 for now until we get some more proton fixes. I can get raytracing to work in CP77 (with that launch parameter), and it worked out of the box for Portal RTX...

Valve put out a hotfix to Proton to fix it's DX12 issues with the game, so we can enjoy FSR2.1 and the upgrade of the game without this workaround. 😊

Quoting: NerdNoiseRadio

Quoting: BlackBloodRum

Quoting: einherjarIt worries me a bit, everytime I read "how to get xy to work again on Steamdeck".

If it does not become a "just works" experience, it will fail over time.

You can't really blame Linux for this. If a game was updated and it stopped working on windows, would you respond "Windows will fail if it doesn't become a just works experience"? No. You'd say the game devs need to test their game more and fix it.

My point here is that we shouldn't be so quick to blame Linux, it's perfectly possible the game is doing something weird which is breaking the compatibility. The fact is, this was just working, but the devs updated it, which has broken it.

We're not physic and we don't have access to the next update, so we can't "fix it" before it's released. Only the game devs could do that.

It seems to me that he wasn't blaming Linux, but blaming Steam Deck - which to be fair, is the buggiest game system I've ever played on a whole host of fronts.

My post was not about blaming. It was just describing a situation.
The average person buying a Steamdeck wants games to just work.

They do not care if Valve, Linux, the devs or whom ever makes it work. They pay money and want a fun experience. And I hope, that this is what Valve can achieve.
And I am a bit worried, that they can not achieve that and that would make the Deck fail. That would also be very bad for Linux gaming.