As in the title of the topic, Shadow Of Chernobyl refuses to launch with any kind of dynamic lighting.

If I turn on static lighting, it works fine. If I switch to dynamic/DX9, it freezes on the splash screen, it doesn't even show the opening videos.

When I go into user.ltx and switch the renderer back to DX8/r1, it launches fine.

Log file is empty.

This is all on a fresh installation. None of this has ever happened to me before, even on the same laptop on which I have the issue right now.

Any ideas?

Intel graphics?

Nope, 3070 ti

I do not know what could be the source of the issue, you could try to download the old june 2010 directx redistributable and install it, it has often fixed problems with DX9 games on modern windows
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

But if nothing works for you, another possible solution would be to install the latest version of the 64bits OGSR engine (the engine, not the OGSR mod) and try to see if it fixes your problem.

I never tried it myself so can't help more than pointing the latest version of the engine :
https://github.com/OGSR/OGSR-Engine/releases/latest

(download the release version, not the debug one)

I did actually experiment a bit, cause after testing the other games, Clear Sky refused to launch at all, while Call Of Pripyat works without issues, no matter which renderer I use.

Reinstalling DirectX didn't help, as that was the very first thing I did, so in the end, as a last ditch effort, I decided to check OGSR for ShOC and OpenXRay for Clear Sky. In both cases the games launched instantly without any problems, which leads me to believe that there is some weird problem with the vanilla binaries of both games.

I've also decided to check how Call of Chernobyl will react with it's own binaries, and it also launched instantly and runs perfectly normally on DX9 and above.

It's good your problem got fixed.
At launch back in its day Shadow of Chernobyl had a lot of problem that they fixed in patches, but still there were many issues left (and why someone made the ZRP , some kind of unofficial patch to fix remaining issues that were fixable in the game scripts, but couldn't do much for the game engine bugs), maybe one of them game engine bug is getting in the way of your modern hardware and drivers.

It's always sad when old games become less and less compatible with hardware evolution, fortunately there are sometime geniuses that manage to code their own compatibility update and share with the world, like the OGSR engine or OpenXRay .

I don't think ZRP is compatible with OGSR engine unfortunately if you were looking into it. But on the good side, OGSR fixed itself some bugs in the old engine so you may not need ZRP as badly as you needed with the default old engine.

Ok, so - 50 years later, but I found the solution.

As expected, there is an issue related to 12th gen Intel CPUs which prevents the game to launch on said CPU models. Now, on Steam there is a beta branch for the game which has a fix for the renderer binaries which allows the game to run if you have a 12th gen Intel.

So far I only tried it on Shadow Of Chernobyl - Steam version with the beta branch launches perfectly fine. Copying the modified xrRenderer_R2.dll to the GOG version also fixes the problem in that release.

I will check if the fixes from the Steam beta branches for Clear Sky and Call Of Pripyat can be applied for the GOG releases too and if so, I will upload the modified files and post the link here for people that have similar issues.

Are you sure your game was actually running on your RTX and not on integrated graphics? The 12th gen CPUs itself don't cause such freeze, it's their iGPU, and that's exactly what Steam patch fixes.

I manually forced the games to use the 3070, so yeah, I'm sure.

The weird thing is that the issue is inconsistent across all games.