EDIT: This has been fixed, it all mostly chalked up to possibly a driver / kernel bug. Why things managed to work so well for so long, who can say? Anyway all you need to do is upgrade your Linux kernel to 6.5.x, and your Mesa driver to the latest Mesa git.
Hey all,
I’ve been playing Starfield for the last two weeks, mostly been having a great time with it! I’m using the latest kisak mesa drivers and ProtonGE, and it’s been a smooth and stable experience for the most part.
However…within the last two days, I’ve started having a major issue. Any time I land on a planet and exit my ship, the loading screen hangs, and I get kicked back to my OS’es login screen (Ubuntu Studio 23.04). The audio continues to play, not in a staggered way, but as if the game was still running. And yet, my desktop has no idea about the executable being active.
I dunno if a patch came out within the last day or so that fundamentally changed something, or maybe my hardware’s just finally started melting after weeks of playing. Performance is degraded out of nowhere.
What’s curious is that, every time I reload my save, the game runs fine from within my ship. But, if I try to travel to another planet, or exit out of my landing bay, everything I’ve just described happens all over again. This seems to happen regardless of whether the game is windowed, borderless, medium graphics settings, low graphics settings.
I decided to check whether my hardware was just straight-up melting. It’s not. My other Proton titles that are relatively heavy (Returnal, Resident Evil 4, The Callisto Protocol) all run smoothly at higher graphics settings.
Some specs info:
- Operating System: Ubuntu Studio 23.04
- KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.4
- KDE Frameworks Version: 5.104.0
- Qt Version: 5.15.8
- Kernel Version: 6.2.0-1013-lowlatency (64-bit)
- Graphics Platform: X11
- Processors: 32 × AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core Processor
- Memory: 62.5 GiB of RAM
- Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
- Manufacturer: ASUS
Also, software:
- ProtonGE: GE-Proton-8-15
- OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 23.1.8 - kisak-mesa PPA
- OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 23.1.8 - kisak-mesa PPA
- OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 23.1.8 - kisak-mesa PPA-
My shot-in-the-dark guess is that you were unlucky, and hit a bug in the game. It might be something triggered by a particular detail in your game state which would explain why you didn’t have problems earlier. You could test that by starting a new character, and testing whether you see the same problem.
If I were in your position and feeling motivated I would submit a bug report to Bethesda with as much detail as I could manage.
Yeah, it’s possible. I’m curious, though, as to why it affected my other saves retroactively? Like, I can run around within TMD / the old Red Devils facility just fine, but the game craps out when I set foot on Mars.
Have you tried backing up your saves and using the delete proton files option?
This will delete your saves from your local device, but it effectively re-installs the game and could clean up corrupted files if that is the issue. I know there’s a lengthy shader compile process, so dumping your shader cache and allowing it to recompile could also be useful.