Forza Horizon 4: Finally Playable Without Crashing?

Going by the reports on ProtonDB, it seems Forza Horizon 4 suffers from random crashing across all GPU vendors, including the Deck. I do recall playing the game back when I had a NVIDIA GPU and getting a consistent crash at the same area in-game.
Seems like u/Conradson spent ten hours trying to figure out a solution. At least for NVIDIA users. Their process is as follows:
- don’t use GameMode
- need to use GE-Proton7-24 for some apparent reason
- Before the first run with GE-Proton7-24, remove the Proton prefix
steamapps/compatdata/1293830
if it exists (in your Steam install folder) - Before the first run with GE-Proton7-24, disable Shader Pre-Caching, then re-enable it to generate new cache (in Steam > Settings > Shader Pre-Caching)
- In-game, disable MSAA in the video settings, you can set the other settings as you like
They reported both singleplayer and multiplayer are working without a hitch. Both the native .deb package of Steam on Ubuntu as well as the Flatpak version worked.
Mildly interesting. Since I refunded the game I can’t verify if this works or not. But I’d be curious if this will work on AMD/Steam Deck.
Game is on sale for 67% off during the Xbox lunar sale.
Cover image credit: Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios