DirectX/DXVK crash when entering universe in Star Citizen 3.8.0 PTU

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Hello,

I have a problem with Star Citizen 3.8.0 PTU (current 3.8.0q PTU.3912323 + previous 3.8.0p PTU.3906481) under Lutris:

Everytime I try to enter the universe of SC DirectX/DXVK seems to crash in the loading screen or when i’m going down the stairs at Port Olisar from the EZ habitation pods. I’m getting a crash dialogue of DirectX while the games EXE is still running in the background.

When I disable DXVK (tested: v1.5 and some of the 1.4.x versions) I’m getting some shader/texture issues with very low fps and I can play as long as I’m not quantum-travelling what is leading to a DirectX/DXVK crash as well.

Lutris log file: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/nrHJdn4W5J/
Lutris debug log with game log: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/3d5P2kK7hB/

The current LIVE patch of SC is working fine for me. I suppose the reason for the crash has something to do with the changes of 3.8.0 PTU.

Hardware specs: Intel i7-4770T - 32GB RAM - Sapphire RX580 NITRO+ 8GB - Samsung SSD 850 (128GB) - Samsung SSD 860 (1TB)
Software specs: ArchLinux, Kernel 5.4.5-arch1-1, amdgpu, Mesa 19.3.1-1, Lutris 0.5.4, lutris-4.16-x86_64 wine version

I tested the last two SC PTU versions only because I have my PTU access since yesterday.

Has anyone the same problem? Is there a solution or at least a workaround for it?

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I solved the problem myself. Cause of the issue was that I’ve used the Vulkan ICD loader for old radeon cards instead of amd_icd for new(ish) cards with amdgpu driver. I removed my old HD5770 two months ago and didn’t knew about that setting in the system options :wink:

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Can you explain how you solved this please?

Are you talking about the settings in Lutris or your OS settings? In Lutris under the ‘Vulkan ICD loader’ setting, I have two options for AMD which are ‘radeon_icd.x86_64.json’ & ‘radeon_icd.i686.json’. Neither of them solve the problem for me - One crashes when going down the stairs and the other crashes before the game can even launch.

I’ve been having the same problem with the game for months and I upgraded to one of the new AMD GPU’s recently so I may have the same issue.

Thanks.

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Ok, nevermind. I’ve found out what I needed to do now so I’ll leave the details here for anyone else that has this problem:

To solve this issue I needed to make Star Citizen uses ACO (which AFAIK is only available from Mesa 19.3 onwards) instead of LLVM. Go to the game’s settings in Lutris > System options > Environmental variables. Add (without quotes) ‘RADV_PERFTEST’ with a value of ‘aco’. You can also set Lutris to use ACO for all games by doing the same thing but in the Lutris main settings. You can also use this command with Steam to do the same things. It can even be set systemwide so all Vulkan apps use it.

ACO is supposedly performing better than LLVM at this point in time. Better framerates and faster shader compilation/caching. Mesa version 20 is supposed to bet a lot better with ACO than Mesa 19.3. And some people are recommending to only set the use of ACO systemwide once you have Mesa 20.

Anyway, it fixed the issue for me so hopefully it helps others too.

Cheers.

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