Solving Bioshock 2 DX10 Crashes + Get Steam overlay to work

It is know that running the game in DirectX 9 mode through the -dx9 parameter does indeed make it more stable. However it does have some pretty annoying downsides, the most notable of those are the brightness levels getting totally blown up, leading to a very weird look even after ajusting the levels in the game options, not to mention sometimes messing up your screen brightness even after you quit the game, forcing you to outright reboot your PC to fix it

Another downside is the apparent absence of Anti-Aliasing in DX9 mode, it can be forced through using your graphics card control panel, but it's a much more taxing solution in what's an already botched PC port

DX10 does not have the brightness problem and also seems to have a native Anti-Aliasing method going on, it also has some visual improvements over DX9. Unfortunately it crashes all the time, no matter what fixes you employ: Ini tweaks, process affinity changes, etc. The only thing you will be doing is buying a little more time until it eventually crashes again

To add salt to the wound, the Steam Overlay only works properly in DX9 mode

DXVK[github.com]

You may have heard of it before, It's basically what makes GTA IV playable on PC, but the whole reason I made this guide was because I didn't see anyone else mention it

The technicalities of how it works are not important as it might as well be outright sorcery, just think of it as something that will perfectly translate in real time the language of DirectX into an entirely different one in Vulkan. But rest assured is not some obscure shady solution, It's an open source project that is constantly being updated and fixes problems in several other games

On my experience, I've finished the base game and Minerva's Den without a single crash, and as a bonus the Steam Overlay now works in DX10 mode, you get the best of both worlds without any of the downsides

Right click on Bioshock 2 on your library, then Properties>Installed Files>Browse

Nagivate to SP>Builds>Binaries

Grab the latest version of DXVK on Github[github.com] (dxvk-X.X.tar.gz)

Use an archival tool like 7-Zip to open it

Open the DXVK number version folder, then the x32 folder (Bioshock 2 is a 32bit game, this is not related to your OS)

Grab the files inside x32 and drop them in the Binaries folder

That's it, no more crashes and a working Steam Overlay, check the notes below for more info

Make sure to remove any launch parameters that aren't -nointro as you won't need them. You could also delete %APPDATA%\Bioshock2Steam to make sure no .ini settings cause any troubles

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In case your game doesn't launch properly, this might be because Microsoft provides their own translation layer that does not actually provide a proper Vulkan driver and therefore can't run DXVK (Microsoft, am I right?) . So make sure you don't have "OpenCL, OpenGL & Vulkan Compatibility Pack" installed on your system apps. You can learn more about this and other common issues at: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Windows

Thanks to es pan for figuring this out!

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Another possible issue is that since DXVK 2.0, you will need a Vulkan 1.3 compatible graphics card, most cards should have out of the box support or added by driver updates, you can find this info with a quick search or by entering the name of your card at this page on Vulkan's website https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/ (Thanks again es pan )

If your graphics card is getting on the years and does not have it, you should try to use a pre DXVK 2.0 version, since I haven't tested them I can't guarantee it will solve all the crashes, but it's surely worth a try

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I could not test this but apparently there was a bug related to specific versions of the Nvidia drivers that would cause the game to freeze on boot, the problem seems to have been fixed since version 580.88, so run an update just in case. More info at: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/4880

Thanks to Pulverdings for pointing this out

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If for some reason you want to make sure DXVK is working, you can create a text file inside the Binaries folder and paste this text inside

Rename this file to Making sure to remove the .txt extention

Start the game and if you see a info graph when you reach the main menu then it is working as intended, to remove the graph just delete dxvk.conf