Launching games with Proton fails after update
mindbound Feb 16, 2023
Trying to launch any Windows game using Proton (I have tried switching between GE, experimental and 7.0) fails silently. The log file created by specifying PROTON_LOG=1 ends with the following:

304.489:0114:0118:err:winediag:nodrv_CreateWindow Application tried to create a window, but no driver could be loaded.
304.489:0114:0118:err:winediag:nodrv_CreateWindow The explorer process failed to start.
304.491:0114:0118:trace:loaddll:build_module Loaded L"C:\\windows\\system32\\api-ms-win-appmodel-runtime-l1-1-2.dll" at 0000000205950000: builtin
304.491:0114:0118:fixme:kernelbase:AppPolicyGetProcessTerminationMethod FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFA, 000000000011FEB0


I'm using Arch Linux, latest stable NVIDIA drivers (525.89.02-3), X11, Xfce. Everything worked well as recently as a day ago. The last update upgraded the kernel from 6.1.11 to 6.1.12 and bumped the package revision (not even the version number) of the GPU driver. Native games run fine. Please advise. TIA.

Last edited by mindbound on 16 February 2023 at 10:14 pm UTC
This topic has an answer marked - jump to answer.
whizse Feb 16, 2023
This sounds like Steam failing to inject some needed library into the container (and runtime) used by Proton.

You can get a list of these libraries and potential errors from Help -> System Information in Steam (It might take a few seconds, it's not done unless you see a wall of text!).

You might also want to ask for help here:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/new/choose
mindbound Feb 17, 2023
Seems like it might be related to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/558, although I'm still failing to actually get any of my games running, it's just that by setting VK_LOADER_DRIVERS_SELECT and unsetting VK_ICD_FILENAMES I get various crashes instead of silent failures.

Solved by the aforementioned issue being fixed + rebuilding shader cache.

Last edited by mindbound on 18 February 2023 at 1:39 am UTC
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