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.