Read-only GeometryBaseline / MinimalEffects comparison

Captured 2026-09-16, approximately 18:40–18:43 Vienna. This does not claim the still-running baseline has passed. No game process was started, stopped, or modified.

Both invocation manifests name the same build SHA256 1A211BEF4655F7C8F8313D5BF4A8D23F43F5B8436C3C5A8E8D8F1BFA345F1FB3, native visible D3D11 1920x1080 window, quality 2/High, automatic Main Camera rendering, and alternating alps-02/alps-03. Both supply -rampageGpuMinimalEffects; GeometryBaseline additionally supplies -rampageNoScenery.

Source distinction: RampageApp.cs:178 forwards the scenery flag to TrackRuntime.Build. TrackRuntime.cs:76 still builds road and terrain; lines 78 onward omit WorldScenery, forest canopy and regional habitat when scenery is false. Camera effects disabled in GraphicsDriverDiagnostics.cs:55 onward are otherwise shared: shadows, screen effects, motion vectors, volumetric/atmosphere effects. RegionalWeather and SceneLighting also omit clouds/garage probe in minimal mode. This isolates a group of world renderers/resources, not a single shader or component.

• MinimalEffects 182158: TDR first recorded 18:26:40.978; report stopped after 10 completed visits, 11,158 rendered frames, 282.24 seconds. Log contains no native Crash marker or module dump, so overlay modules cannot be retrospectively verified for that process from its saved files.
• GeometryBaseline 183350: direct read-only module query of PID 48876 at 18:41:33 confirms nvspcap64.dll 11.0.9.251 and nvppex.dll 32.0.16.1692 loaded, alongside D3D11/nvwgf2umx. The snapshot is geometry-baseline-process-modules.json. A later report snapshot had 20 visits and 499.66 seconds without logged errors, while still running. Module presence alone does not prove an active overlay or causation.

MinimalEffects has a material additional symptom: its first 17 buffer-creation failures return 0x8007000E (E_OUTOFMEMORY), before subsequent 0x887A0005 device-removed failures. Those lines are between road-drive and offroad-phase markers; phase timing bounds them approximately 18:26:38.974–18:26:44.525, encompassing the NVIDIA TDR at18:26:40.978. Therefore their ordering before the actual TDR is unknown. They establish allocation failure, not necessarily exhausted physical VRAM. The report's graphicsDriverBytes and workingSetBytes are zero/unavailable; Unity allocated/reserved memory near failure is 453/561 MB.

Today's Application Error events naming Rampage.exe are 11:41:37 and 16:03:40, each approximately 6.93 seconds after the last preceding NVIDIA reset event. Earliest NVIDIA event today is 08:41:15.84. No logged native application crash preceding its NVIDIA reset was found; this does not exclude an unlogged underlying fault. .NET Runtime and Application Hang searches since 14:00 returned no matching events. Details: process-crash-nvidia-order.json.

No supported native Windows per-process anti-injection switch was established:

• Unity 6000.3 Player CLI contains no NVIDIA-overlay disabling option. D3D11 BitBlt/flip switches change presentation, not documented injection control.
• NVIDIA developer response describes proprietary recognition hooks and points to overlay settings. Later notification settings suppress notifications; they do not establish module unloading or blocked injection. No current documented per-process environment/API switch was found.
• Wine's own loader documentation change documents WINEDLLOVERRIDES disabling DLLs. That mechanism belongs to Wine's loader and does not control this native Windows Unity process.
• NVIDIA FrameView 1.7 manual documents per-executable exclusion lists for FrameView. It does not establish suppression of NVIDIA App/Share nvspcap64 or nvppex, and editing it would be a persistent tool setting rather than a process-only CLI change.

Conclusion: the ongoing geometry reduction and the failed full-scenery minimal-effects run provide useful controlled workload evidence. They do not establish whether the failing layer is game resources, Unity, the driver, injected modules, or hardware.