Ubuntu
AMD It’s best to enable a PPA for the latest Mesa drivers. There is a PPA that packages and releases the latest changes straight from Mesa’s Git. Add the PPA to your system and update. Then, upgrade your system. It will automatically upgrade your existing Mesa packages.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt upgrade
When it’s done, install the Vulkan packages.
# apt install libvulkan1 mesa-vulkan-drivers vulkan-utils
NVIDIA Ubuntu also has a great repository for the NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Add it to your system, and update Apt.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
$ sudo apt upgrade
Now, install your drivers and Vulkan. $ sudo apt install nvidia-graphics-drivers-396 nvidia-settings vulkan vulkan-utils
Fedora
AMD You should already have the latest AMD drivers installed on your computer. Install the Vulkan packages. # dnf install vulkan vulkan-info NVIDIA The proprietary NVIDIA drivers are available from the RPMFusion repository. Add it to your system, if you haven’t already. # dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm Then, install the drivers with Vulkan. # dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia akmod-nvidia vulkan vulkan-tools
OpenSUSE
AMD You should already have the latest available AMD drivers on your system. Install the Vulkan packages with zypper. # zypper in vulkan libvulkan1 vulkan-utils mesa-vulkan-drivers NVIDIA Head over to the the OpenSUSE documentation, and follow the procedure for your version of OpenSUSE. When you have your drivers, install the Vulkan packages. # zypper in vulkan libvulkan1 vulkan-utils
Arch Linux
AMD You already have the latest AMD Mesa drivers. Just install Vulkan support. # pacman -S vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon NVIDIA Install the NVIDIA drivers. They include Vulkan support. # pacman -S nvidia lib32-nvidia-utils
Vulkan Info
Vulkan Info
The first ting that you can do to ensure that you have Vulkan installed and working on your system is run the vulkaninfo command to pull up relevant information about your system. If you get info about your graphics card, you’ll know that Vulkan is working. $ vulkaninfo | less
DoTA 2
There’s another more practical way to see how Vulkan performs on your system. You can install and play DoTA 2. It’s one of the first Linux games to support Vulkan completely, and it’s free to play. The only thing you need is a Steam account.
First, install Steam on your system. It’s available on all the distributions above. When you have Steam, you can install DoTA 2 easily enough.
Vulkan DoTA 2 Client
When you have DoTA 2, you can see a series of checkboxes on the main game page. Check the one for Vulkan support. Steam will start downloading it.
Vulkan DoTA 2 Settings
Start up DoTA 2, and open up the settings. Change the graphics API to Vulkan, and restart the game. When DoTA 2 starts back up, it’ll be running with Vulkan. Play the game a bit to test it out.
Closing Thoughts
You are now running Vulkan on your Linux desktop. If you followed along through DoTA 2, you already have a working game making use of it. All the other Vulkan based tools and programs are also open to you now too, including using it with Wine and DXVK. That opens up plenty of new games to play on your system.
Vulkan support is only getting better. More games are making use of it, and other Linux utilities are stepping up too. Wine is actually even developing support for DirextX 12 with Vulkan too. Keep your system updated and enjoy the progress.