Still on v0.73 or v0.74? Download this release by hand once (their launchers check the wrong place for updates, fixed in v0.74.1). From v0.74.1 on, the launcher offers it by itself.
🛡️ AMD Radeon Crashes Fixed
• A graphics pipeline the driver refuses no longer closes the game (Oussama268, #413). This was the crash on RX 6600 / 6700 XT / 6750 XT near the 4th colossus's arena and on the bridge to the 9th (#397, #408, #393): the driver returned ErrorUnknown and the port stopped. Its draws are now skipped and the log says SOTC PIPELINE FAILED.
• Two causes of the refusal fixed, found with the Vulkan validation layers: a shader variant created against a layout one binding short (the LOD feedback buffer of High/Maximum textures), and game bytes uploaded into a depth buffer kept in another format. NVIDIA tolerated both; AMD did not.
• RX 6000 owners: please test where the game used to close and attach the launcher's report if it still does.
🎨 Random Colours on Older AMD Cards Fixed
• Magenta / green / blue / white colours on characters, fog, smoke and particles on AMD GCN (RX 470–590, Vega) fixed (marko0905, #411): a compute shader read a GPU lane that does not exist on 64-wide hardware. SOTC_WAVE64_ABSENT_LANES=0 turns it off.
🧵 Other Crash Fixes
• Silent crash in the heap guard fixed (mrgroeff, #409): the game heap's fields are read through the backing view, which is never protected.
• The game no longer closes at "Resource Loading" with Windows Control Flow Guard on (Oussama268, #414, #322).
🔧 Launcher
• The update repository now lives in a packaged file, so no merge can point the updater at a fork again (Oussama268, #415).
ℹ️ Notes
• The shader cache is rebuilt once on the first start (expect some stutter at first).
• Side-by-side test in the open world (same route, empty shader cache on both): same FPS as v0.74.1 (57.0 vs 57.8) with fewer hitches (18 frames over 50 ms vs 29).
• With the game's debug menu on, rare crashes can happen. Keep it off for normal play.