Andromeda stopped working under Proton Experimental

[barrymead]

Last week everything worked just fine, but today, I tried to run Andromeda on my Ubuntu 22.04 Linux computer running the Steam Play Proton Experimental as usual, but the program will not start. It never even gets to the EA games pop-up it just makes you wait for the Vulkan shaders then quits. There are no error messages or any information to explain why it quit working. Has anyone else seen this behavior? I verified the integrity of game files, and tried Proton 8.02 as well as Proton Experimental. but nothing is working. Why is this game broken? Before the thing broke, I did notice that the steam box said an update was being installed. Did this update break everything? Can I revert to before the update? How?

[barrymead]

It was working until today (under proton experimental or proton 8), but today it stopped working when the update got installed.

[barrymead]

The program DOES RUN under Proton 7, but it is so laggy and slow even the audio drops out from time to time. The video is so choppy that I couldn't play the game in this emulator. I even have the graphics set to "Medium" which was great under Proton 8/Proton Experimental, but insufficient under Proton 7. I might have to set the graphics quality down to low if I am stuck with Proton 7. I hope they fix this problem soon, or I won't be buying any more steam games that rely on Windows Emulation!

[barrymead]

Suddenly, it started working again under Proton Experimental. After trying it and getting it to work under Proton 7. Perhaps running it under Proton 7 cleared out some kind of error so that when I returned to Proton Experimental it worked again. I don't know what was broken or how it got fixed, only what I did and what happened.

[barrymead]

My video card is not the fastest. I only have an NVIDIA GTX 970 which is about 6-years old.
I hear that the new NVIDIA RTX 3070 is supposed to be great at speeding things up at about $500.00 it is not cheap, but a pretty good price/performance option. What do you have in your machine?

[barrymead]

I just noticed that my motherboard only supports PCIE-16 3.0 not 4.0. It would be a waste
to buy a graphics card that requires the 4.0 PCIE bus when my MB only supports 3.0. So I ordered a GTX 1660 for about $250. It arrives tomorrow so after it arrives, I hope to be able to run Andromeda at "High" graphics quality instead of only "Medium" We will see.

[barrymead]

I thought I would see a "huge improvement" going from the GTX970 to the GTX1660ti, but such was NOT the case. My game performance actually went DOWN when I tried the GTX1660ti. I went back to my GTX970 and on Monday, I am returning the GTX1660ti. glxgears went from 27000 fps to 18000 fps and Andromeda went from 60fps on the Tempest to about 30fps. Even the sound dropped out with the slower GTX1660ti installed. I was very disappointed. It is possible that if I update the nvidia driver from 530 to 535 speed may change, but that requires a dist-upgrade which may break many other things, so I am not going to try it. Linux makes upgrading hardware more hit and miss.

[barrymead]

I really appreciate your help and suggestions. No I just changed to the new card and left my proprietary nvidia 530 driver installed as it was for the GTX970. Tomorrow, I will try to revert to the nouveau driver before installing the GTX1660ti. Then I will reinstall the driver suggested by the "ubuntu-drivers devices" command.

[barrymead]

Which Radeon AMD graphics card do you use? Does it have PCIE-16 V3.0 or V4.0 bus requirement? My MB only does PCIE-16 V3.0. Do you have a recommendation as to a good UPGRADE from my GTX970 in the Radeon world? I would like to roughly double my speed if possible.

[barrymead]

Apparently the GTX1660ti is slower then my GTX970 because the speed of RAM access on the GPU is slower. All the fancy GPU features don't make up for slower memory access time in the big picture.

[Bendman]

Same problem on me. Andromeda dosen't start with any Proton version since one week. No changes on my system. Originally I used GE-Proton7-53.

[barrymead]

The GPU memory clock speed of the GTX970 is 1753Mhz vs 1500Mhz for the GTX1660ti. I think this is where the difference is coming from. I tried every recommended installation and configuration tweak, and still got the same results, so I returned the GTX1660ti this morning for a refund. Perhaps when I build up a whole new system with PCIE-16 4.0 or 5.0 capable motherboard and a core i9 13900K CPU with 64GB of DDR5 RAM and a GFORCE RTX3070 I can run my games faster. This old computer with the i7 and ouit-of-date motherboard, is just not very upgrade-able anymore.

[Maria]

Yup, not working. I tried all versions of Proton mentioned. It used to work for me under Proton Experimental.

[barrymead]

When it stopped working for me, I switched to Proton 7 and that cleared the error and I was able to switch back to Experimental after that. I haven't tried playing it today to see if it broke again. I just tried running Andromeda today and it worked just fine. I am not sure how I cleared the error. I also rebooted a couple of times. Try rebooting and using Proton 7. See if that fixes your issue.

[Maria]

At least you got an error. I don't even get anything in the logs to even attempt a debug.

[Maria]

Registry? Yea, my OS doesn't use those.