Alright, let’s go back to the beginning. It’s extremely strange to run out of memory with 32 GB of RAM — the only time that should happen is if there’s some kind of memory leak.
Since you say it happens during shader creation, the next thing I’d try is deleting all your shader caches (look for every shader-related folder in Steam, and also clear the .cache folder in your home directory, because it can contain Nvidia shader data).
After that, test with a different Proton version, for example GE-Proton, which usually works very well. You can install it downloading it directly from GitHub (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom) or more comfortably, through ProtonUp-Qt. To install ProtonUp-Qt, use yay and choose the -bin version (it’s faster).
You should also go into /home/your_user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata and try renaming the folder of the game you want to run before launching it, so that Steam creates a fresh prefix.
Also, try monitoring your RAM usage while you launch the game to see if it suddenly fills up or if something weird happens — and check if any specific process is using an abnormal amount of memory. That will help confirm whether there’s a memory leak or something else behaving incorrectly.
heya alber the only other thing i didnt think to mention is that my gpu does nothing after i boot a game. i think this problem is a little to far out my skill set, and may need a more direct hand of help. sorry for the late response bad day.
Never knew about protonup-git-bin. What does it give you that proton-ge-custom-bin doesn’t (regarding Steam, of course)?
I’m not sure if I understood your question correctly. ProtonUp-Qt is the graphical interface that lets you download and install any specific version, not only GE-Proton, but also Proton-CachyOS and other variants, easily and with just a couple of clicks. When I mentioned the “bin,” I was referring to protonup-qt-bin, which is slightly outdated but installs faster since it’s precompiled.
The other options would be compiling protonup-qt from the AUR, or installing an already-compiled version from Chaotic-AUR.
Alternatively, you can install proton-ge-custom-bin from the AUR or Chaotic-AUR, which provides the latest version and keeps it updated automatically. Or, of course, you can download the desired version directly from GitHub and place it in the appropriate folder.
In the end, afaik, there’s no difference as long as you install the same version (currently GE-Proton10-25).
Ok, don’t worry. If you get a chance, try using a different NVIDIA driver and see if that changes anything.
EDIT: For your GPU, the recommended drivers are nvidia-open or nvidia-open-dkms. If you already have one of these installed, you can try previous versions using downgrade.