I pre-ordered AC8 with the expectation that the Japanese developer team at Project Aces would have been as considerate as they were when they worked on Ace Combat 7. AC8 is unable to load the campaign at all.

SYSTEM SPECS:
Linux Mint 22.3
Proton experimental, hotfix, 10, GE 11.7
CPU: AMD RYZEN 7 5800X3D
RAM: 32GB DDR4 5600MT/s
GPU: INTEL ARC A770 (i915 kernel driver)
MESA 26.2.4

ISSUE: After selecting difficulty and get the black loading screen, I end up with a message from Unreal Engine 5 with error code 01 that something fatal happened and needs to crash,

Upon inspecting a crash log, The crash is a null-pointer read inside the game itself. It’s an access violation at AceCombat8.exe+0x34EA805, reading address 0x18, with several registers at zero.

A) It’s the only real error vkd3d-proton logs. 16 compute pipelines fail to create (hr 0x80070057). The shaders ask for fixed wave sizes of 64 (11 of them), 128 (2) and 4 (2), but the A770 only supports 8–32.

B) A seventeenth shader uses FP64, which also isn’t supported.

C) If the engine doesn’t handle those failures and later uses the missing pipelines, you’d get exactly this kind of null dereference. That matches a crash during level loading, when those shaders would first be needed.

This is a plausible explanation, not a proven one. The pipeline failures happen about 11 seconds after launch, and the crash is roughly 100 seconds later. I can’t see from the log which feature those shaders belong to.

EXTRA LOGS:

LowLevelFatalError [File:E:\jenkins\workspace\live-SeasonA-cook\UE\Engine\Source\Runtime\RHI\Private\PipelineStateCache.cpp] [Line: 437]
Shader compilation failures are Fatal.

0x000000014360a07b AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x000000014360d5a7 AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x00000001416c7839 AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x00000001416cbb1e AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x00000001416c36a3 AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x00000001416b288b AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x00000001416c8e00 AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x000000014171e244 AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x0000000141898256 AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x00000001418980ac AceCombat8.exe!UnknownFunction []
0x00006fffffed0c59 kernel32.dll!UnknownFunction []

Crash in runnable thread Background Worker #4