Pitch-black textures on 2016-era Radeon gpu

Support Linux
1

Using a Radeon R5 430 graphics card on Debian Trixie Linux, most textures in Tower Unite appear pitch black. Launching the game without any launch options in Steam gives the error “DirectX11 feature level 10.0 is required to run the engine.” The Radeon R5 430 supposedly supports DX12 of a feature level higher than 10.0 so this error seems to be erroneous itself. Running the game in DX10 mode also gives the DX11 error. Adding “PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%” to launch options allows the game to boot and be fully playable, however all textures are as shown in the attached images. Any surface that is not transparent or light-emitting is rendered so dark it may as well be jet black.

PC specs:

CPU Brand: Intel(R) Core™ i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz

Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) (64 bit), Kernel Version: 6.12.101+deb13-amd64

Video Driver: AMD AMD Radeon R7 200 Series (radeonsi, oland, ACO, DRM 3.61, 6.12.101+deb13-amd64) (this is the correct driver for this GPU as the Radeon R5 430 is identical to the Radeon R7 200)

Driver Version: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 25.0.7-2+deb13u1, OpenGL Version: 4.6

Primary VRAM: 2048 MB

RAM: 11911 Mb

Screenshot_2026-08-23_19-37-34
Screenshot_2026-08-23_19-37-341152×864 156 KB

Screenshot_2026-08-23_19-14-08
Screenshot_2026-08-23_19-14-081152×864 90 KB

2

I have solved the issue after 8 hours of troubleshooting.

Simply install Steam via Flatpak (and not via apt as I have or via .deb package) and it runs perfectly with no launch options, parameters, tweaks, or configs at expected performance (low in my case).

Digging deeper, Steam’s package “steam-installer” in Debian’s repositories (which also affects users of distros based on Debian such as Ubuntu, Mint, and so on) seems to have outdated or possibly broken GPU “stuff,” which quite frankly is above my level of understanding. In summary, if you install Steam using a package manager like apt or via a .deb package, it may have trouble communicating with your GPU. Installing Steam via Flatpak is not only more up-to-date but resolves this problem of Steam and my GPU miscommunicating with each other.

Consider this closed. Thank you to anyone who happened to read it. I hope this helps someone out there.