Choose where the game is installed, by @innateessence; @EdouardSence's fixes for the menu labels, the Linux taskbar
icon and LAN Play over a VPN; @guillo1990's free roam hitches and GPU hang reports; the Shy Guy Bazaar triangles by
@flavio-silva; @tibor-stick's AMD GPU resets on Linux; @andreknieriem's Steam Deck memory; @SavageCore's game folder
updates; handheld resolution by @titooo7; and a faster start on AMD cards on Linux.
Changes
- Choose where the game is installed (#224 by @innateessence, #284): the game files always went beside the
launcher (on Linux~/.local/share/mkw-recomp), and a folder moved elsewhere was set up again in the old place.
@innateessence added "Choose game folder" to the files page: the game files, saves, mods, logs and shader caches go
to the folder you pick (a new one is set up there; an existing installation is used as it is), the launcher's own
mkw.inionly remembers which folder, andMKW_GAME_DIRoverrides it. With no folder picked everything stays
where it was. - Frame hitches in free roam from a pass rendered one layer at a time (#296 by @guillo1990): a draw whose
pipeline is still being built is skipped when its target was rendered recently, and the frame waits for it when it
was not (a volume or table drawn only once). @guillo1990 found a free roam pass that renders one of its 12 layers
each frame, so every layer looked like a one-shot draw and the frame waited 36 to 43 ms for the pipeline. Rendered
within the last 16 frames now counts as recent. - GPU hangs that the driver never reports now leave a report in the log (#297 by @guillo1990): on NVIDIA 620.70.06
(Linux) the GPU stopped with Xid 109 while the game stayed open and the log said nothing (#13 and #206 looked the
same). @guillo1990 added a check: when the GPU has not finished a submission in 5 s, the log names what it had
started and not finished, with every step between them and the shader programs involved. - GPU memory left empty when video memory runs low (#295 by @andreknieriem): on a Steam Deck (1 GB of video
memory, low preset, 1.8.0 time trial) the game's GPU memory pools got their memory in 4 MiB pieces, and a piece
that did not fit was left empty while released render targets still held 2 601 MiB. @andreknieriem found that this
was the only allocation that gave up at once; it now drops released and idle textures first and tries again, as
textures and upload buffers already did. - AMD GPU resets with "Illegal opcode in command stream" on Linux (#281 by @tibor-stick; #43, #50): the thread
that records the GPU commands told the submitting thread it had finished while its last commands could still be in
the CPU's write-combining buffers, so the GPU sometimes ran leftovers of an earlier recording and the driver reset
it. @tibor-stick found it with a patched RADV that checks every command buffer when it is recorded and again when
it is submitted (108 broken in a 106 s run); the recorder now flushes those buffers before it says it is done. - About 6 fps at the title on Intel Meteor Lake (#283, #289): the Intel driver there (Mesa 25.3 and 26.0) has no
memory that is both cached and coherent, so the copies of game memory the GPU reads, kept in sync every frame, went
into uncached memory and the CPU read them at about 0.25 GB/s. They now use the cached memory and write it out and
read it back explicitly (MKW_SHADOW_CACHED=0restores the old choice). Not yet confirmed on that hardware. - Profiles in the launcher (discussion #288): the name the game showed was always "Local". The start screen now
has a Profiles page, opened from the "Profile: name" row under Play: each profile has its own name (up to 10
characters, as on the console; also what LAN players see) and its own save, and the one marked Playing is the one
the next start plays. The save you already have is the first profile, named "Player" until you rename it; removing
a profile takes it off the list and keeps its save inprofile/players/deleted. - Crash at 2160p on game version 1.8.0 (#255, #210): with the internal resolution at 2160 the game's render-buffer
pool (250 MiB, sized for the console's 1440-line targets) ran out at the title screen and the game died in
ShadowPrePass. The second pool now comes from memory the runtime reserves beside the game's heap, sized by the
resolution and the shadow map, so it fits at any resolution without taking memory from the game. The game logic is
checked; the 2160 picture itself still needs a GPU with memory for it (the developer's Radeon 660M runs out). - Play no longer hangs after many mod changes: before the first start with a new set of mods the launcher copies
the save tosave-before-modsand keeps the newest 10 copies, but it was not allowed to delete the older ones and
tried again forever, so the 11th change of mods froze the launcher on Play. The old copies are now deleted (only
those dated folders), and the launcher goes on if one cannot be. - Reset all settings keeps your mods: it also emptied the list of enabled mods.
- Giant triangles over Shy Guy Bazaar (#291 by @flavio-silva, #72): for single frames the 3D scene was covered by
huge triangles there. MKW fills its instanced characters' animations on the GPU into pitch textures of 70-190 KiB
and its CPU code reads their bytes in place every frame; only targets up to 64 KiB went back to memory at a fence
wait, so the bones read zeros or stale bytes. @flavio-silva traced it down to the two game functions and the
textures; pitch textures now go back at the fence whatever their size: 0 wrong frames in his Flower Cup, from 16-75
per 600. - NVIDIA: the device loss with "instruction pointer invalid" (#22, also #112 #133 #137 #142 #166 #189 #203 #208
#212 #219 #221 #230 #231 and discussion #139): the Shell Cup after its video, Star High Sundae's lap 2, Moo Moo
Meadows after the cows and the Special Cup's unlock animation stopped the GPU on drivers 616-621, Turing to
Blackwell. The draws that fault use vertex shaders that read a constant bank at an address computed from a vertex
attribute; the shader that faults and its twin that does not differ only in one such read (c74a0d4eand
852f48d6). Those reads went through a second uniform block declared on the same binding as the bank, the only
aliased binding of the translation; they now go through a read-only storage view of their own binding, bounded by
its range, as the console's bank. Verified on the captures (same images) and not on an NVIDIA card: the
skip_programsworkaround stays, and this is the version to try without it. - Internal resolution in handheld mode (#248 by @titooo7, #195): with Settings > Graphics > Operation mode on
Handheld, the 3D scene rendered well above the chosen resolution (1476x828 for 540p), as the game draws all of its
3D lines there and only 65 % of them docked. @titooo7 measured both modes on an AYN Odin 2 and the setting now
gives the chosen lines in either; the log line names the mode. - Menu labels no longer mix with other labels' letters (#250 by @EdouardSence, #61): on AMD cards on Linux,
menu texts drew another frame's glyphs for a frame. @EdouardSence traced it, on an RX 9070 XT, to pages of game
memory the GPU copy took from a shadow that did not have them yet, and measured each step: 2 947 stale pages before
the fix, 8 after, and no swapped labels on screen. - The game's icon in the Linux taskbar (#252 by @EdouardSence): on Wayland (KDE Plasma and other compositors with
window icons) the game's and the start screen's windows showed a generic icon; they now carry the chequered flag. - Updating a game folder to another version no longer keeps the old version's files (#261 by @SavageCore): a
folder set up from 1.0.0 and then from 1.8.0 kept 1.0.0's files next to 1.8.0's, and the internal resolution was
built from 1.0.0'sgeneral_formatarchive. @SavageCore found it on a 23 GB install, where the setup now removed
203 files 1.8.0 does not have; the same cleanup also runs for.nupand.nxcopies, and never in a linked folder. - A setup that stops before doing anything leaves a log now (#251):
logs/setup.logis opened first, and while the
setup runs it writes there every two minutes where it is waiting. - The setup compiles with more jobs where memory held it back: a compile was given 1 GB and takes at most 0.4 (a
12-thread PC with 13 GB went from 8 to 12 jobs, 330 s to 302 s for the game's code; an 8 GB PC with 8 threads from
4 to 8).logs/setup.lognow says how long each step took. - LAN Play with a VPN such as Tailscale (#245 by @EdouardSence, discussion #148): entering LAN Play went straight
back to the menu (error 2318-0007) when the VPN's adapter came first, as the game took its /32 address. @EdouardSence
found it in the reporter's log and reproduced it on Linux; the port now takes an address with a real network first,
and says in the log when only a /32 one is left. - 48:9 for three screens side by side (discussion #264): Settings > Graphics > Aspect ratio now offers 48:9 (5760x1080,
7680x1440 on NVIDIA Surround or AMD Eyefinity) beside 21:9 and 32:9. Races show more at the sides and the menus and
HUD keep their shape; "window" already took that shape from a full-screen window. - The start screen in Thai, Japanese, Korean or Chinese (discussion #193): its title, Play button and page names showed
?for every letter, as only the small text took the system font with that script; they all do now. The log also
says which language the game was given and whether the setting or the system's locale chose it. - With Settings > Game > Language on Automatic, the game follows the language chosen in Settings > Menu > Language
when the game has it (discussion #193): picking Thai there gives the game in Thai too after a restart, instead of
the system's language. A menu language the game lacks (Turkish, Ukrainian) still leaves it to the system. - Terrain on GPUs whose sparse textures take other memory than buffers (#215, GTX 750 Ti): the terrain's texture
tiles came from memory shared with a buffer used to clear them, and on that card no memory type serves both, so not
one tile could be made and the driver then lost the device at the loading screen. Those tiles now take the
texture's own memory type, without the clearing buffer. Checked on our cards by forcing that path (same images). - The picture fills the window when the driver's surface is larger (#140, ROG Ally with Windows at 1280x720): the
driver gave a 1920x1080 surface for the 1280x720 window, the picture was fitted to 1920x1080 and Windows showed its
top-left part, off-centre and cut. The picture now goes in the part the window shows. - The HDR setting is kept (#168): Settings > Screen > HDR was written to
mkw.inibut dropped at the next start
("unknown key 'HDR'" in the log). - A faster start, and a smoother loading screen, on AMD cards on Linux: the terrain's sparse textures were bound to
their memory one 64 KiB block at a time, 11 471 driver calls in one frame of the logo (a hitch of 1.5 s) and about
20 000 more while the loading screen ran at about 10 fps. The blocks of a row now bind as one; on a Radeon 660M the
logo hitch is 0.5 s shorter, the loading screen goes from 6-7 s to 5 s and the title comes 1.7 s earlier.
Tested before publishing
From these packages, before publishing:
- The whole setup on Linux (Radeon 660M, RADV) in 15 minutes, its warm-up 1 087 frames without a fault, and on
Windows 11 (GTX 1050 Ti) in 25 minutes, its warm-up to the end without a fault. - Before the tag, on
main: the sparse bind change against the title capture (same images as the reference), and
boot runs to the title on the Radeon 660M.
Install
- Linux x86-64, glibc 2.31 or newer (Debian 11, Ubuntu 20.04, SteamOS and later):
chmod +xthe AppImage and run it.
The game it builds lives in~/.local/share/mkw-recomp. On 64-bit ARM (ARMv8.2: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and newer), the
-aarch64.AppImage. - Windows 10/11 x64: unpack the zip into a folder and run
mkw.exe. - Either: a Vulkan 1.3 GPU and about 30 GB free. Open Game files, point it at your own dump of Mario Kart World
1.0.0 or 1.8.0 (itsexefs/andromfs/, or one.nupor.nxfile) and press Prepare. Nothing of the game ships here: the setup builds it on your
machine and downloads NVIDIA'snvdisasmandptxas(pinned by sha256; 84 MB on Linux, 126 MB on Windows) to
describe the shader encoding.
Updating
From 0.1.5 on, the start screen offers a newer release (Update to vX) and installs it: it downloads it, checks it,
replaces the program and sets up again only what changed. From an older version, once by hand: Linux, run the new
AppImage; Windows, unpack the new zip over the same folder; then press Prepare again (the steps already done are
skipped).
Known issues
Reporting a problem
Open an issue with the bug form and attach the logs: logs/mkw.log (the game and the start screen) and
logs/setup.log (the setup's tools), in ~/.local/share/mkw-recomp on Linux and next to mkw.exe on Windows.