Mesa 25.2.7 appears to break Proton games

Ask Fedora
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1

With mesa 25.2.7 games no longer function via steam with proton. Native games are working.
When attempting to launch a game, steam will display as “running”, but the game will not actually launch.
Downgrading to mesa 25.2.4 fixes the problem.

System:
Fedora 43 KDE

Graphics card:
AMD RX 7900 XTX

Workaround for those affected:
sudo dnf downgrade ‘mesa*’

4 Likes
2

Thanks!! Same issue…but just in one of my two PCs. I was reinstalling and trying to find a workaround in Steam, but just downgrading worked in my gaming pc.

System:
Fedora 43 KDE

Graphics card:
AMD RX 6800 XT

3

Okay, this is very odd. I have an NVIDIA GPU and the proprietary drivers. Downgrading mesa somehow fixed the issue for me, but why was it an issue in the first place? How is mesa breaking Proton for Steam? That is very peculiar.

System:
Fedora 43 KDE

Graphics card:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti

Proprietary NVIDIA driver version:
580.95.05

4

Same issue.

System:
Fedora 43 Sway Spin

Graphics Card:
Radeon 7800 XT

Mesa DRI driver:
25.2.7

5

Same,

RX 6700XT, Fedora 43, with Mesa 25.2.7 no Proton games work. Oddly enough games using regular WINE with DXVK work.

After downgrading Mesa and plasmashell (though that was for a different issue) I was able to launch games as expected.

6

It looks like the issue relates to this merge request that hasn’t been merged upstream yet, but was backported into mesa 25.2.7 for Fedora:

1 Like
8

How can I downgrade Mesa in Fedora Silverblue?

9

I think you can do something like rpm-ostree override replace https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2025-a878fc9e87

I haven’t had a chance to test this as I don’t have a silverblue installation currently.

Edit: Just checked on a new install in a VM and this will downgrade. If you have any of the freeworld or other mesa packages from rpmfusion you may have to take additional steps.

1 Like
10

Strange, everything works as normal for me.

On Fedora KDE, also with 25.2.7. On the AMD 9070 XT myself.

11

Same issue, I can also confirm that downgrading from 25.2.7 to 25.2.4 works.
Fedora KDE, RTX 3080Ti

1 Like
12

I must have reinstalled Fedora 5 times yesterday!, in my case, the games started normally but refused if I used obs-vkcapture, plus I had strange behavior in gnome at certain times, like installing the nvidia drivers the only clickable window was the software center with the code to sign the drivers (for secure boot), the rest of the applications wouldn’t start, only those that use xwayland (possible?, applications like putty or VSCodium). After installing the nvidia drivers everything went back to normal, except for the system information page, in the settings, which froze and completely froze the settings application. After a few minutes the system information page worked, again very strange behavior. Thank you for this post. i didn’t know how to address the problem anymore, and downgrading solved it all.

13

This update should fix the issue:

https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2025-2f4ba7cd17

5 Likes
14

I haven’t had any issues but I’m using GE-Proton10-25 as the global default. I switched to normal proton and few games wouldn’t load. Might be something to try.

Using a 7900XTX with the latest Mesa 25.2.7

15

I finally got around to testing it and I can confirm 25.2.7-3 fixes the problem.

16

just updated too. I can also confirm it works again!

1 Like