Can't play Skyrim on Linux OS. Can anyone help?

[judge-cover]

I have Debian 11 OS and have installed the Steam app. I then installed Skyrim onto my hard drive.
But when I press play to play the game - the Skyrim opening splashscreen opens with the 'Play' button. But when I press play - the game closes and I am returned to the Steam app.
I think I may have to update my AMD drivers or do I need to change any Settings on the Steam app?

[Malkiah]

Well debian 11 is pretty old by now. So depending on the proton version you are using to play skyrim, you might have some issues. In regards to drivers, you can use mesa drivers just fine to play skyrim, but if you need the official AMD drivers for professional work, then expect some weird bugs here and there in games.

[Alex]

There's most likely an issue with Xorg/proprietary drivers/proton no longer matching each other, and the opens-source drivers are often a hit-or-miss. Try to install the ATI driver package, and see what it says. At worst, you'd have to update your distro.

[Death Approaches]

distro shouldn't matter, you could probably get away with running any kernel the version of proton you're running needs, if you have 3D graphics it shouldn't matter either but for speed, this stuff is abstracted under wine, as long as it can spit pixels at the screen in a format it understands, in this case DX11, it's not concerned if you get 3fps or 300fps, it's doing it's job...

almost everytime you crash out at starting a new game before you see the cart, it's prerequisites, but the install script should have taken care of that...

try going into properties and specifically picking which proton to use under compatibility, which doesn't really matter, but for the hell of it pick proton-7 or 8, OK that, and try again. It's probably not it, I mean the defaults are probably set for Decks now, which are linux AMDs, but it's worth a shot.

LOTS of people have issues with an AMD update that came out back in Jan I think, be it microcode or something specific to CPU or GPU, I don't know, but I know lots of discussions of older games with AMD users in them, have a lot of unhappy players. I assume this will affect linux gamers as well.

[Malkiah]

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

distro shouldn't matter, you could probably get away with running any kernel the version of proton you're running needs, if you have 3D graphics it shouldn't matter either but for speed, this stuff is abstracted under wine, as long as it can spit pixels at the screen in a format it understands, in this case DX11, it's not concerned if you get 3fps or 300fps, it's doing it's job...

almost everytime you crash out at starting a new game before you see the cart, it's prerequisites, but the install script should have taken care of that...

try going into properties and specifically picking which proton to use under compatibility, which doesn't really matter, but for the hell of it pick proton-7 or 8, OK that, and try again. It's probably not it, I mean the defaults are probably set for Decks now, which are linux AMDs, but it's worth a shot.

LOTS of people have issues with an AMD update that came out back in Jan I think, be it microcode or something specific to CPU or GPU, I don't know, but I know lots of discussions of older games with AMD users in them, have a lot of unhappy players. I assume this will affect linux gamers as well.

On linux, you have something called libraries, and certain system libraries can affect playing games on steam. It usually only affect native games but considering the bug reports I have seen on proton's github, older libraries do affect proton 9 and probably 8 as well. So old libraries or simply mismatched libs can lead to a game crashing. Deabian 11 is 5 years old now, and the kernel it uses is 7 years old now. So something that old is bound to cause issues with modern proton versions, since some of the optimizations implement since then weren't a thing at the time. And to give you a perspective, debian 11 is EOL this year.

So I honestly recommend updating it to debian 12 and use the mesa drivers if possible, because in terms of gaming they are better than AMD's and even AMD's devs acknowledge that. So as I said before, unless you have a professional reason, you should just use mesa instead.

[sdack]

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

distro shouldn't matter, ...

The problem you get when using older distributions is that these come with older hardware drivers and older versions of Vulkan.

I would start by looking at what vulkaninfo says. It should report a Vulkan version of 1.3.x. If it is not even installed chances are that Vulkan has not been installed yet. Once it has a usable Vulkan version installed would I test with vkcube if it can actually render a simple Vulkan test demo. Then at least OP would know whether his system supports Vulkan rendering or not.

[Death Approaches]

there is nothing that would prevent the game from running on plain wine in a much much older kernel or distro, is all I'm saying. People did for many years (but usually without sound) up til about 2015, but late 2018 proton changed that, and especially v4 was where it really got good FNA-XNA/OpenAL so we didn't have to force xaudio2_7.dll native DX overrides with winecfg anymore... positional audio with spatial queues, just like it was a regular thing, no tedious alsa config edits...

I highly doubt it's got anything to do with your vulkan implementation, but that's easy enough to test, just pass "PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%" as your runtime parameters to fall back to OpenGL rendering and see if that gets rid of your black screen, or set a proton lower than 5.0 where it wasn't the default yet.

It could be anything graphically related, for all we know you're on an AMD iGPU since you didn't give us one technical specification...

[judge-cover]

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

distro shouldn't matter, you could probably get away with running any kernel the version of proton you're running needs, if you have 3D graphics it shouldn't matter either but for speed, this stuff is abstracted under wine, as long as it can spit pixels at the screen in a format it understands, in this case DX11, it's not concerned if you get 3fps or 300fps, it's doing it's job...

almost everytime you crash out at starting a new game before you see the cart, it's prerequisites, but the install script should have taken care of that...

try going into properties and specifically picking which proton to use under compatibility, which doesn't really matter, but for the hell of it pick proton-7 or 8, OK that, and try again. It's probably not it, I mean the defaults are probably set for Decks now, which are linux AMDs, but it's worth a shot.

LOTS of people have issues with an AMD update that came out back in Jan I think, be it microcode or something specific to CPU or GPU, I don't know, but I know lots of discussions of older games with AMD users in them, have a lot of unhappy players. I assume this will affect linux gamers as well.

I was using the default Proton version (Experimntal) and this is why it didn't work. I updated to Proton 7 and the game worked! Thank you so much for your help.

[judge-cover]

Originally posted by sdack:

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

distro shouldn't matter, ...

The problem you get when using older distributions is that these come with older hardware drivers and older versions of Vulkan.

I would start by looking at what vulkaninfo says. It should report a Vulkan version of 1.3.x. If it is not even installed chances are that Vulkan has not been installed yet. Once it has a usable Vulkan version installed would I test with vkcube if it can actually render a simple Vulkan test demo. Then at least OP would know whether his system supports Vulkan rendering or not.

Yes it seems to be a Vulkan issue. When I updated to Proton 7 I noticed Vulkan shaders were being dowloaded. I thik my default version of Proton didn't have these upgrades for the game.

[Death Approaches]

heh funny enough that's not why, the reason I wanted you to switch proton versions, that triggers the setup of your compatdata\489830\pfx winebottle again, for prerequisites that didn't install correctly the first time, but regardless, I'm glad it's working for you!

[sdack]

Originally posted by judge-cover:

Originally posted by sdack:

The problem you get when using older distributions is that these come with older hardware drivers and older versions of Vulkan.

I would start by looking at what vulkaninfo says. It should report a Vulkan version of 1.3.x. If it is not even installed chances are that Vulkan has not been installed yet. Once it has a usable Vulkan version installed would I test with vkcube if it can actually render a simple Vulkan test demo. Then at least OP would know whether his system supports Vulkan rendering or not.

Yes it seems to be a Vulkan issue. When I updated to Proton 7 I noticed Vulkan shaders were being dowloaded. I thik my default version of Proton didn't have these upgrades for the game.

Steam's Proton, which is based off WINE and uses by default DXVK to translate DirectX calls into Vulkan calls, requires Vulkan to render games.

Death Approaches is however not wrong and you could go without it if you forced Steam's Proton to fallback to the old OpenGL code. But you do not want to do this, because it is a lot slower. Make sure to use the latest graphics driver and to support the latest Vulkan version. This will keep DXVK happy and get you the best performance.