Broken particle effects on Vulkan for years

[sethdusek]

Your system information

• System information from steam (Steam -> Help -> System Information) in a gist:

• Have you checked for system updates?: [Yes/No] Yes

• Are you using the latest stable video driver available for your system? [Yes/No] Yes

• Have you verified the game files?: [Yes/No] Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

This issue has been happening for atleast 4 years but only randomly. Particle effects in game glitch out and shoot out random team logos/other particles, causing severe problems. The most extreme example is when the Giant Wolf in creep camp casts its damage reduction, the resulting effect covers most of my screen with some random team's logo like Alliance or IG.

I haven't been able to reliably reproduce this or what causes it but it happens every other game. I found a video on reddit with the same issue. https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/17fig18/the_dota_2_linux_experience/

I have tried RADV_PERFTEST=zerovram incase the game is reading some uninitialized memory but that does not solve the issue. If there's something I could do to help reproduce this (some sort of logger/profiler I can run when this happens) I could do it next time it happens.

Also had this issue happen to me on an old Intel system running Vulkan, and have tried different mesa steam. Right now I'm running steam in a gentoo chroot but the same happens with the flatpak

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Play one or two games
2. Something happens, not sure what but it causes particles to glitch
3. Now towers/creep camps/outposts will have weird particle effects for the rest of the game

[MissPotato]

I can also confirm the same issue on my machine, using Linux.Intel i5-4440 CPU, and AMD rx 560 gpu. It does not seem to be tied to the length of play session, but instead the number of games. It almost always happens after 3 games of turbo.

Gist: https://gist.github.com/MissPotato/ccf59411f587a490afb81f8b58599c4d

[sethdusek]

Here are some examples from my games of weird particle effects. Weird particles shooting out of outpost: Camp spawn boxes corrupted:

[sethdusek]

More examples:

Wolf damage reduction:

[bergmannf]

Just chiming in to confirm this happening for me as well - AMD 6750 XT and it also only happens after playing a few games, not really after a certain amount of time.

[flynesss]

Same problem with Vulkan, Windows 11 (23H2) nvidia rtx 4070 (552.44 driver), amd ryzen 5600x. Random effect glitch time to time.

[sethdusek]

Any way to help with debugging this? Can I use renderdoc/vulkan validation layers to capture a trace or would using that trip VAC?

[luxalpa]

I have the same issue. For me it always reproduces if I go to one of the tabs (like the Dota+ tab) while I am currently in a match and then switch back to the match.

[raphaelsalomao3]

Same issue.

[Dracosophy]

i've had something similar, where it seems a texture will "come loose" almost; imagine a straight edge of a model where a texture should follow along as a piece of string, then take one end of the string and pull it out of your screen towards you, and watch as the texture bends into a very long, elongated, thin triangle which sticks to the string and when you look at whatever model this bug is stuck to, it will fill half your screen or more and block much of your vision.

i also have noticed the 'sparks showers' from things like rank icons at end of matches/scoreboards, arcana skins and other similar particle bursts cause vulkan to freeze into segfault with a rare actual error msg about vulkan failing and being forced to shut down the game.

Garuda (Arch) XFCE Linux running a old but excellent GTX660 Ti 2gb card which must use the nvidia 470xx drivers (i'm sure if i was using the latest nvidia drivers the i wouldnt have these issues, but this card works great in windows directex and even in vulkan when it's not bugging out is fantastic; it supports all the minimum specs etc so it should still work fine). AMD dual core 270 3.4gz OC to 3.67 ... the rest of my system is solid, if old, and i get a solid 25+ FPS even in the worst conditions, with 40-50 FPS being the normal hovering point. i've seen FPS go into the 80s as well. That's running on 1920x1080, with texture and game quality set to whatever low, med high, or 50-100% all the checkboxes are switched off to make sure i dont have any issues ofc (i know i have an old box haha)

I always wonder about the "compute shaders" check-box though.. would it be better on or off for my system?