When installing AMD drivers I was prompted to choose Vulkan packages. I chose amdvlk lib32-amdvlk which turns out to have been a mistake. This led to almost every game using Proton crashing on launch with one of the following two error messages in the PROTON_LOG logs (among much longer more unique stack traces). The “correct” packages which resolved this issue are vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon.
Error type 1, from games including Craft the World, Ring of Pain, Slipways:
14981.844:0124:0128:err:vulkan:wine_vkCreateInstance Failed to create instance, res=-9
14981.844:0124:0128:trace:loaddll:free_modref Unloaded module L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winevulkan.dll" : builtin
err: DxvkInstance::createInstance: Failed to create Vulkan 1.1 instance
Error type 2, from games including Banished, Ring of Pain, Slipways:
16234.652:0124:0128:trace:loaddll:build_module Loaded L"C:\\windows\\system32\\wineopenxr.dll" at 00007C20DE360000: builtin
warn: OpenXR: Unable to get required Vulkan instance extensions size
info: Enabled instance extensions:
info: VK_KHR_get_surface_capabilities2
info: VK_KHR_surface
info: VK_KHR_win32_surface
16234.652:0124:0128:err:vulkan:wine_vkCreateInstance Failed to create instance, res=-9
I’m posting this for posterity, since I’ve seen a few other people post elsewhere about what might be the same issue but a lot of disparate troubleshooting efforts may or may not have worked in those situations. Hopefully if anyone makes the same mistake I did, they will find this thread.