NBA 2k25 freezing after minutes

Well, this is frustrating...

I've been using Bazzite and I'm super impressed with its stability and how well everything works, including Windows games run vastly better and more smoothly than on Windows. There's just one annoying issue: NBA 2k25 keeps freezing randomly a few minutes into the game.

My config is:

• Ryzen 1700
• Nvidia 1080 Ti
• Nvidia driver 570.124 (latest stable)
• KDE 6.3.1 Wayland
• kernel 6.13.5

I believe the game uses DirectX 12. I don't know whether the issue is in the Nvidia driver, Wayland, the game itself, Proton, or some combination thereof. My system is otherwise stable as a rock and other Steam games that I've tried run perfectly well (including DX12 ones).

The freeze happens at random points in the game, usually well before 15 minutes of playing, and the symptoms are always exactly the same. There’s a 1 second freeze, then another 1-2 frames get rendered, and then the freeze becomes permanent. The sound stops briefly but then continues to play and the system remains “alive”. After a freeze happens I have a few seconds to switch to console mode and kill the process. If I don’t switch within a few seconds, then the system becomes unresponsive (though still alive) and I can only use Magic SysRq to nuke the process. The desktop environment sometimes survives whereas other times it crashes and kwin_wayland needs to be killed. After the freeze, the game process continues to use 100% CPU, and after a while the Plasma process goes up to 100 as well.

Things that help (but don’t fix the issue):

• Freeze probability seems correlated with the amount of “work” the GPU is doing, so lowering settings, resolution and playing in a window instead of full screen makes the game playable for longer (but not long enough).
• Proton Experimental and GE Proton 9.26 anecdotally seem to work better than other versions.
• X11 instead of Wayland makes the game freeze not affect the rest of the system, i.e. the game window freezes, but everything else continues to work.

Other things I’ve tried that seem to have made no difference:

• Various Proton environment variables (I tried a whole bunch that were reported to help with freezing, at the very least these ones: VKD3D_DISABLE_EXTENSIONS=VK_KHR_present_id,VK_KHR_present_wait PROTON_HEAP_DELAY_FREE=1 WINE_DISABLE_VULKAN_OPWR=1 PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1)
• Gamescope with various settings
• Running Steam through Lutris with various settings
• Changing monitor refresh and VSync settings
• Changing HDR and other display settings

Based on reports on ProtonDB, this issue happens more commonly (or exclusively) on Nvidia cards, even though obviously other games run fine on Nvidia with the same setup.

Does anybody know what’s causing this or have any ideas how to fix it?