I always mix up vkgears and vulkaninfo. I meant the latter.

Run it without setting the environment variable and it should dump a lot more information.

Oh, might also be useful getting more of the vulkaninfo output.

Considering the depth you’ve gone in troubleshooting, you’ve probably already considered this, but just in case you haven’t: could it just be the shaders compiling? Wine (and the associated translation layers) need to convert shaders from the format used on Windows to the Linux one. This can only be done during gameplay because the shaders aren’t all submitted upfront.

It can cause some pretty crippling frame rate issues, especially when loading into a new area/map.

If you leave the game running for a bit, and things get better (only to get worse randomly later), it’s possible this could be the case.

There are some patches for async compilation, and they may be on by default in proton, I’m not sure, so this could entirely be another deadend.

Best of luck!