The “Revelations” DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages introduced a texture problem with newer mesa versions. A fix was implemented but I did not want to wait for the official release. The only option was to compile the branch myself and run this local version against DOOM. I did all of the following steps on my Ryzen AI 350 Zenbook with CachyOS. I began by cloning the official repo and following the build setup steps in the official docs. Since there was no specific guidance for Arch, I tried to collect the packages with this command (I might have had some of the dependencies already on my machine prior to building mesa):
> sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git meson ninja python-mako python-packaging flex bison clang llvm directx-headers libdrm expat wayland-protocols libelf libglvnd vulkan-icd-loader rust-bindgen cbindgen
Now on to the build. In the root folder of the cloned mesa repo:
> meson setup build
> meson compile -C build
If this returns without any errors, then we now have a valid build ready. Be sure to check out the actual branch / commit you want to test - in my case that was 498aaebf.
Now we want to verify that this actually fixes the problem. To do that without installing the driver to your system, you can launch applications with the current dev build you just created. So let’s launch Steam and launch our game from there. Exit Steam first, just to be sure.
> meson devenv -C build steam
In DOOM, you can verify the driver version by going to Settings > Video. Scroll down to the Show Performance Metrics option and set it to the highest setting. When you launch the game, it should show the actual commit you are using, as shown in the header image of this post.
The black texture bug is fixed and all is well in hell. Also be sure to check out the game and its DLC. It might be my favorite DOOM, just inches behind Eternal. Given the dire situation at Xbox and id Software, we can’t be sure if we’ll ever get anything like it again.