I have this annoying issue that renders my game not playable on steam deck. Basically, the game starts and runs fine. After I win the first level it crashes before it opens the next one. I suspected that Open Level By Name was an issue. I changed it everywhere to Open Level By Object Reference. Still no success. As I said, the first level Intro and the level itself (Those are two different levels) work fine. Opening next level causes the crash. The game works without any issues on my PC. The problem only occurs on Steam Deck.
Maybe some of you already experienced this issue. What could cause this? Please help.
Hey there @lucky_geo_mango! If it is only occurring during level changes, that narrows it down a little, but not enough to recommend a course of action. It could be due to the nature of how the steamdeck handles file locations or even a proton issue if you’re not building for linux targets. You may need to try debugger attachment and see where the fault is:
Seeing a similar issue here, getting frequent crashes whenever new PSOs are discovered. First, the game would crash (Fatal Error!) on launch with the logs showing something like
LogRHI: Display: New Graphics PSO (4000764098)
LogRHI: Display: [I omitted the huge PSO here]
LogRHI: Error: Breadcrumbs 'RHIThread'
I disabled Lumen and could then launch, but the first map would crash again (this time compute PSOs). I deleted rect lights and spotlights (only a sky light left) and could now run the map. Now whenever I spawn the first actor with a Quixel material on it (which again means new PSOs), the game again goes down. Sometimes it’s a Fatal Error, sometimes the game seems to just get killed mid-way, even cutting in the middle of a log line, which reminds me of some graphics driver timeout detection.
This was with a DirectX 12 build (tried Debug, Dev, Testing and Shipping) running through Proton. I’ll try a Vulkan build now and see if that helps, but generally, this is really puzzling.
Hey there @Daerst! Welcome back to the community! PSO’s failing mid line is definitely a new one, and a serious problem to debug! Is it only failing on the Deck/through proton? What version of UE?
Hey there, thanks for the reply. We recently had a playtest with 3000 players on Windows, and got reports that might (or totally might not) be a similar issue from some Intel IGPs, but largely, the game ran fine. On Steam Deck through Proton, it’s consistently crashing with DX 12, even in simple test scenes that only show a lit cube, for example. When we’re switching to Vulkan, it runs fine.
I’m using an unmodified source build at tag 5.1.1/commit 5ca9da84, Steam Deck is brand-new and up to date. I haven’t tested many other games and don’t know if I have a UE5 game at hand to see if it runs smoothly.
Let me know if I can be of any help to debug this issue, I’d be happy to.
I had read of there being an issue with DX12/proton for some UE5 projects, but never got a response from the user to verify anything. It seems they had a workaround that had worked out (which is obviously not ideal in your situation near release) that they were using ProtonGE but that was back when 5.03 was prime if I remember correctly.
I’d usually say helping you to dig into the data would be best especially since you have a large sample, but to say that I’m not well versed in the source for the rendering side would be an understatement. With Vulkan working would that be a feasible workaround in the meantime while we get information together for a report?
Also kinda unrelated but you mentioned some specific windows user issues:
There is currently a possible issue under investigation for Windows 11 based laptops, and their overlap with integrated GPUs are pretty large so it’s possible that issue could be affecting the windows users if it’s not the same.
It works for now and we’re not in a big rush, release is still ways out, so all good on our end. Still, would be good to know what’s wrong here at some point, so if there’s an Epic engineer who could look into this, I’d be happy to provide any info I can or strip our project down to the bare crashing minimum.
We can definitely make a report and see what I can dig up, though getting a team member specifically usually comes from the direct support with Unreal Developer Network (UDN), though that’s studios with custom licenses. If you’re studio already has one we can put a question through on that side, alternatively we can see what we can discern here.
Could I get a look at the full RHI log and the crash callstack altogether?
No UDN license, but don’t get me wrong - I’m not asking for support, we’re switching to Vulkan and moving on for now. If there really is a vanilla UE5 project configuration that makes DX 12 consistently crash with Proton though, I’d assume either Epic or Valve would be interested in knowing why.
I will send over the logs from the initial case where Lumen was enabled and the build crashed on launch with a Fatal Error! message.
Oh no worries, just have to make that disclaimer since I’m kind of in between support, usually I dig into issues, get to the reason they are occurring, if it’s in scope to fix/workaround do so, otherwise we go to full reporting.
I saw the DM and I’ll check it out and see if there’s any solid clues we could go off of there. If we can find some clues it’ll make it easier to get full reports to all parties needed.
UE5.2
This might be niche and may not be the same problem as lucky_geo_mango, but I’ve narrowed down my Steam Deck crashing to something related to lumen + a shadow-casting skylight.
Disabling the “Cast Shadows” bool on skylight made the crashes no longer happen
I strongly suspect the crash happens when the skylight shadow is on AND this cvar changes:
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.Allow
^This cvar changes from 0 to 1 depending on your Global Illumination scalability.
In my game, the scalability settings update on Begin Play, so it gave the appearance of crashing when loading the second level (as level 1 did not have a shadow-casting skylight)