[Feature request] Don't silently fail on outdated drivers

[Blisto91]

Now that proton experimental have raised the driver requirements for both dxvk and vkd3d-proton games i think it would be better UX if steam explicitly gave a warning about unsupported drivers instead of just failing to launch outright and the user having to look in a text log. A pop-up could suffice. The current way of just failing and just writing to a proton log, if it is even enabled, is not very user friendly.

Didn't find another issue for this but if there is one feel free to close this ofc 🙂

[Blisto91]

Even tho it concerns proton i thought the feature better be integrated into the steam client. 🤔 But i guess i can see it making sense it being on the proton issue tracker so ty for the auto moval 🙂

[amotzkau]

Where do I find the driver requirements?

After today's update, proton experimental is skipping my Vulkan adapter and I'm still trying to find out, why. Even the proton log doesn't contain an explanation for it.

[Blisto91]

The ones at the top here apply for dxvk (dx9 to 11) https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Driver-support

Here is similar for vkd3d-proton (dx12) https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton#drivers This one doesn't state directly the minimum driver requirement for Nvidia but the extension VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering was responsible for the highest bump and also needs the 510 drivers as a minimum.

Also the proton changelog usually mention if anything like that changes. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog

[Fighter19]

I agree, I was on a very old driver. Finding out what was even causing the DirectX problems included looking up the environmental variables for DXVK and finding the appropriate threads. Costed like 40 minutes (probing around different version), but could have been resolved way faster by just looking at my driver.

@amotzkau Currently it appears to be NVIDIA Driver 515 (or rather Vulkan 1.3 support) for Proton Versions newer than 7.0-4 (I encountered it with Proton Experimental)

[gwhizoftv]

Hi All,

I want to try out Proton on an AWS EC2 instance. Any recommendations on

1. Linux flavor (prefer Debian so far)
2. EC2 instance type (e.g. G4ad, or ?)
3. AMD ok for GPU ?

Many thanks!

Message ID: @.***>

[kolAflash]

Every game "crashes differently" because of this problem. And most users probably absolutely won't know what to do. Even experienced Linux users may not know why a game reports:
"A D3D11-compatible GPU (Feature Level 11.0, Shader Model 5.0) is required to run the engine."
(error from Ready Or Not)
Many users probably assume, that the latest game update raised the GPU requirements and they need to buy a new GPU... (which is completely not the case)

Every Linux distro from before 2022 is affected, because the needed Vulkan-Loader-1.3 is from February 2022.
(even for distros from first half of 2022 it's quite cutting edge to include this)
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/3062#issuecomment-1364830533

So it's quite edgy by DXVK to require Vulkan-1.3.
The DXVK people say: Just use DXVK < 2.0 if your system doesn't has Vulkan-1.3 yet. So if someone installed DXVK on it's own, this is a feasible workaround. But it isn't if Proton/Steam handles DXVK!

Maybe Proton should test the Vulkan version. And if < 1.3 it should automatically switch to DXVK < 2.0!

Alternatively Proton may itself ship Vulkan-Loader > 1.3 and the also needed Mesa > 22.0.