God of War III Remastered for PC 2.3.0

Linux: the AppImage (gow3-x86_64.AppImage) attached to this release is built on Ubuntu 24.04 (glibc 2.39) by the Linux AppImage workflow and runs on SteamOS, Bazzite/Fedora, Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 or newer.

Game

• Textures turning yellow, orange or white after some time of play are fixed (#138; also #56, #59, #131, #155, #193, #194, #197, #200, #254, #271, #303, #318). The ground after Poseidon, the rocks in the Heart of Gaia and other textures kept stale contents: GPU readbacks wrote the game's memory without telling the texture cache, so the textures over that memory were never reloaded. Found and fixed by @hmathsan (#331). If you turned Performance → Deferred GPU readbacks off as a workaround, turn it back on: the fix works with both settings, and with it on the game runs about twice as fast in heavy scenes.
• Steam Deck and other RADV systems: the block corruption on Kratos, the logo and the characters is fixed. Sparse buffer binds now go to a queue that supports them (#143, #204). Found and fixed by @hugouchoasborges (#252).
• Black screen on laptops with an AMD integrated GPU and an NVIDIA GPU: the AMD switchable graphics Vulkan layer hid the NVIDIA GPU; the launcher now turns that layer off (#263, #248, #150, #310).

New options

• Anisotropic filtering (Graphics → Anisotropic filtering): Game default, 2x, 4x, 8x or 16x. Sharper floors and walls seen at a steep angle. Applies when the game starts (#224, #341).
• Vibration strength (Game → Controls → Vibration): from 0% (off) to 100% (#152, #198, #242, #341).
• F12 screenshots: saves the game's image as a PNG, without the port's overlay, in the screenshots folder of the saves; Graphics → Screenshots opens that folder (#341).

Thanks to @brunoweierich-ctrl for these three options (#224).

Launcher

• The launcher version is now always shown in the sidebar, below the in-game menu hint.
• Discord Rich Presence (#130, #217): new option Advanced → Launcher → Show Discord Rich Presence, off by default. Discord shows that you are playing God of War III Remastered; the elapsed time is kept when Discord reconnects.
• Clearer messages when the game closes: after guest memory (error 1450) the launcher explains how to let the Windows page file grow, and after code=0xa0020001 it says the dump may be incomplete (#175, #104, #149, #208, #33).
• The start-up memory warning is shown only with resolution patches above 1080p, no longer on every start on PCs with 8 GB of RAM.
• Complete Spanish translation of the launcher.
• Linux: the mouse pointer no longer disappears over the launcher (XWayland), the wheel scrolls the pages, and the GPU list is found without the .exe name (#268). On Windows, the mouse side buttons no longer scroll the page.

Documentation

• READMEs in English, Portuguese and Spanish updated and reorganized, with tables of contents, the manual page file steps for error 1450, and corrected build instructions (#338). The outdated roadmap was removed.
• Building from a fresh clone on Windows no longer fails with patch does not apply (#335).

Known issues

Start and crashes

• Crash at start with the full 1.02 update (eboot.bin sha256 6e72330e...): Fault: write access to 0000000000007458 at ntdll.dll followed by STOP: guest raised debug exception code=0xa0020014 (#175, #213). Under investigation.
• Startup crash 0xC0000005 in ucrtbase!strlen right after the audio threads start (#46).
• Overwolf's overlay (ow-graphics-hook64.dll) crashes the game at start: close Overwolf before playing (#199).

High frame rates

• At 120 or 240 FPS, some spots block progress: Kratos cannot pass a path or climb a ledge (#114, #313), and button-mashing prompts may not advance (#56, #110, #312). Workaround: set Engine frame rate to 60 for that spot, then back.

Textures and lighting

• Render resolutions other than 1080p can show more broken textures and too bright areas (#294, #260); on some AMD GPUs the picture is drawn small in a corner (#121, #142). The texture fix of this release was tested at 1080p only: please report whether these still happen.

GPUs

• Intel HD 630 (#35): 3D renders black or blue only. Intel Iris Xe (#188): crash on the first level load. Intel UHD: Device lost during submit in the cutscene where Athena gives Kratos the blades (#216), and wrong global lighting (#206).
• RX 550 (#196): crash Unknown data_format=15. RX 580 (#287): crash with Format10_11_11. RX 5500M (#181) and GTX 750 Ti (#259): ErrorOutOfDeviceMemory.

Performance

• Large FPS drops with Spartan Rage, the Blade of Olympus and the Nemean Cestus (#68, #118, #164, #182, #240).
• The shader cache can grow past 20 GB (#177). The performance overlay adds input lag (#153).

Audio

• No music in some cutscenes (#77); audio out of sync in the cutscene after the River Styx (#167) and in Hephaestus' cutscene (#264).

New options

• F12 screenshots were not checked on an HDR display, and the three new options were not checked in game on Linux yet.

Validation

• Release package played on an RX 6700 XT (Windows 11, 1080p): the game opens, saves and loads; F12 screenshots, vibration at 100%, 50% and 0%, and anisotropic filtering at 16x against the game default were checked in game, also over a longer session (#341).

• Texture fix (#331), on AMD: reproduced on an RX 6700 XT (Ryzen 5 5600X, 1080p, 240 FPS engine) with the previous main, then gone with the fix after Poseidon and in the Heart of Gaia, also with deferred readbacks off. Median 132 FPS with the fix against 128 without; no errors in the log.

• Texture fix (#331), on NVIDIA: tested by @hmathsan on an RTX 5070 (Ryzen 7 5700X3D, Windows 11, deferred and stale readbacks on). The yellow ground and the missing textures in the Poseidon fight no longer appear, the rocks before the climb out of the Heart of Gaia no longer turn white, and the FPS stayed the same as before.

• Python suite: 306 tests passing on Windows. C++ tests graphics-settings, perf-overlay, warmup-inbox, pad-map, page-state, readback-queue, readback-sources, wait-diagnostics, aliasing and async-pipeline-cache passed.

• Fresh clone with core.autocrlf=true: the FSR patches apply (#335).

• RADV fix (#252) confirmed on a Steam Deck by @hugouchoasborges; laptop black screen fix (#310) confirmed by the players in #263.