God of War 3 PC Port.
Now Playable.

A deadlock between the emulated GPU and the game's EOP thread on the first flips. The window opened and the counter moved, but no picture ever appeared. Found from dumps of a stuck process and fixed in 2.2.0 by a patch that is always applied, even when the launcher kept a patch selection from an older version.

1. Update to the current release. This one is genuinely fixed, not worked around.
2. If it persists, open Advanced then Log, and report your GPU, driver, game build and the log.
3. Do not clear the shader cache as a first move. It is not a general fix and forces a long recompile next launch.

Windows ran out of virtual memory for the guest pool the port allocates. It is a page file setting, not a port bug.

1. Press Win + R and run SystemPropertiesAdvanced.
2. Performance, Settings, Advanced tab, Virtual memory, Change.
3. Uncheck automatic management, select drive C:, choose Custom size.
4. 16384 MB initial and 24576 MB maximum is a sensible start. Click Set, then OK.
5. Restart the PC. The guest pool needs contiguous space, so a reboot matters.

Read user\last_run.log next to the exe, or the log viewer under Advanced. The log names the failing step: a missing game folder, an incomplete dump, a driver without Vulkan 1.3, or the CPU.

A line starting STOP: this CPU lacks means your processor is missing SSE4.2, POPCNT or AVX. There is no setting that works around it. The port needs a 64 bit CPU with AVX: Intel Sandy Bridge from 2011 or newer, or AMD FX or newer.

Since 2.3.0 the launcher says so directly: the dump may be incomplete. Point it at the folder that contains eboot.bin, sce_module and sce_sys.

Select the folder itself, not the sce_sys subfolder. A partial copy, or a folder holding only the update and not the base game, is the usual cause.

GPU readbacks wrote the game's memory without telling the texture cache, so surfaces over that memory were never reloaded. It showed up on the ground after Poseidon and on the rocks in the Heart of Gaia. Fixed in 2.3.0.

1. Update to 2.3.0 or newer.
2. If you had turned Performance, then Deferred GPU readbacks off as a workaround, turn it back on. The fix works with both settings and heavy scenes run roughly twice as fast with it on.

The game draws with a 2-sample depth buffer and reads it as a texture. AMD's and Intel's Windows drivers return zero for half of each 8x8 tile there, so lighting, fog and bloom inherited visible bands. Fixed in 2.1.8.

The port now creates the game's multisampled images with a single sample on those two driver families and leaves NVIDIA alone. Check Performance, then GPU data, then Game multisampling: the label names your card and the decision, for example "Automatic (Intel Arc A750 Graphics: off)". Choose Off manually if the lines appear on some other card.

RADV needed a queue that supports sparse buffer binds. Fixed in 2.3.0, which is the release Deck owners were waiting for.

Download the current gow3-x86_64.AppImage. There is no Linux updater, so replacing the file is the update. The published 2.2.0 AppImage still has this bug.

The AMD switchable graphics Vulkan layer hid the NVIDIA GPU from the port entirely. Fixed in 2.3.0: the launcher turns that layer off for you.

If you are on an older build, set the launcher's Graphics card choice to the NVIDIA adapter explicitly, and add bin\gow3-probe.exe to your driver's per-application profile.

Two different causes, both fixed. On CPUs whose timestamp counter differs per core, sceKernelReadTsc followed the raw rdtsc, so the game jumped several seconds whenever a thread changed core. Since 2.1.8 it follows the process clock instead.

The other cause is a missing frame rate patch: the engine, direct memory and VBlank rate follow whichever patches actually applied, so if one could not be found the game no longer speeds up. The log says which patch was skipped.

The first start prepares the game image and there is no shader cache yet, so the opening minutes compile pipelines while you play. A small "Loading shader cache" note appears in the corner.

From the second launch onward saved pipelines load in the background. Keep the user folder: deleting it throws the cache away and you pay the compile cost again. Stutters and missing effects during compilation can still happen, and are expected rather than broken.

The reference number, 144 FPS average at 1080p with the 240 FPS engine patch, came from a Ryzen 5 5600X and an RX 6700 XT. It is a reference, not a floor.

1. Keep Deferred GPU readbacks on. Off is roughly half speed in heavy scenes now that the texture bug is fixed.
2. Drop the render resolution one step. 1440p is the sweet spot on a mid range card, and 4K also triggers a start-up memory warning.
3. Set anisotropic filtering to 16x only if you have headroom. It applies at game start.
4. Judge every change with the overlay on Insert, then the Overlay tab. It reports the game's own numbers.

Pads go through SDL3, and keyboard and controller work at the same time, both remappable on the launcher's Game page. A controller connected after the game started is not always picked up, so plug in first and restart.

For the prompts themselves, use Game, then Controls, then In-game button icons: Original, Match my controller, Xbox or Nintendo. It rewrites two files inside the port's data folder and never touches your game folder. On a pad without a touchpad, View opens the pause menu and L1 + View opens photo mode.

The renderer is not God of War III.exe. The actual game process is bin\gow3-probe.exe, or out\gow3-probe.exe for a source build. Add that executable to RTSS.

1. Add gow3-probe.exe in RTSS, then enable Afterburner's on-screen display.
2. In the ReShade installer, pick the same executable and choose the Vulkan API, not DirectX.
3. Still nothing: report the port version, the overlay version, the last port version that worked, and attach user\last_run.log.

Only shadPS4 saves are compatible, and only for the same title ID. RPCS3 saves come from the PlayStation 3 game and will not load.

1. Source: shadPS4's user\savedata\1\CUSA01623\, or home\<user-id>\savedata\CUSA01623\ on newer builds.
2. Destination: user\savedata\1\CUSA01623\ next to God of War III.exe.
3. Copy each slot folder in, keeping its name. Do not nest another CUSA01623 folder inside.
4. Beside each slot create <slot>.sce_sys if it is missing, and put shadPS4's icon0.png in it.
5. Never rename param.sfo to param.bin. The formats differ. Keep any existing port param.bin.

The save dialog shows at most 32 entries. If your imported slot is missing from a long list, test it with a separate Saves folder containing just that slot.

No, not if you keep the user folder that sits next to God of War III.exe. Saves, settings, shader cache and last_run.log all live there, and the launcher backs saves up before every start.

Extract a new zip over the old folder, or use Advanced then Check for updates. Settings for the launcher itself are separate, in %APPDATA%\gow3-launcher\settings.json, and on Linux in ~/.config/gow3-launcher with saves in ~/.local/share/gow3.

Before 2.1.7 everything was off on the full 01.02 update and on the European CUSA01715 build. Each patch site and cheat hook is now found by the original code around it, so it applies wherever a release placed that code.

A site that cannot be found leaves only that patch off, and both the log and the launcher's patch list say which one. Tested: CUSA01623 and CUSA01715, versions 01.00 and 01.02. Other regions may work but are untested.

A known launcher bug: turning the experimental temporal upscaler on and back off leaves Screen sharpening (RCAS) off in gow3.ini.

Turn it back on under Image, either in the launcher or in the in-game menu. Worth knowing: FSR 1, FSR 3.1, FSR 4, TAA and DLSS are all disabled in 2.2.0 and later while the author reworks them, so the switches exist but do nothing.

You have an earlier download. The AppImage was rebuilt on October 14 for glibc 2.39 and newer, which is what makes it start on SteamOS, Bazzite, Fedora, Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 or newer.

Download the AppImage again, then chmod +x gow3-x86_64.AppImage and run it. On an older distribution the launcher startup is not checked, so treat it as untested rather than broken.

Using the optional Update folder without Windows Developer Mode means the temporary view is not removed cleanly when the game exits, so those folders accumulate.

Leave Update folder empty and merge the update into the game folder instead. If they are already there, they are safe to delete once the game is closed.

Mods and patches are applied in memory at start, and your game folder is never modified, so a broken list is always reversible by disabling it. The launcher's mods page has load order, presets and conflict reporting.

Order matters when two mods touch the same file: the later entry wins. Change one thing at a time and restart, because nothing applies at runtime.

GPU specific rendering failures, crashes, audio problems and progress blockers are still under investigation. They are tracked in the project's issue tracker rather than fixed by a setting.

Before reporting: update to the newest release, search the existing issues, and include your GPU, driver, game build, the failing patch list from the log, and a save from before the problem where that is relevant. Attach user\last_run.log.

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