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To run a Vulkan application, you will need to install the vulkan-icd-loader package (and lib32-vulkan-icd-loader if you also want to run 32-bit applications), as well as Vulkan drivers for your graphics card(s). There are several packages providing a vulkan-driver:

The following are software rasterisers, so that you can use it on devices that do not provide Vulkan support.

For Vulkan application development, install vulkan-headers, and optionally vulkan-validation-layers, vulkan-man-pagesAUR and vulkan-tools (you can find the vulkaninfo tool in here).

To see which Vulkan implementations are currently installed on your system, use the following command:

To ensure that Vulkan is working with your hardware, install vulkan-tools and use the vulkaninfo command to pull up relevant information about your system. If you get info about your graphics card, you will know that Vulkan is working.

On systems with multiple GPUs you may need to force the usage of a specific GPU. vkdevicechooserAUR provides and easy way to do this. It will install to the system's Vulkan layer directory, /usr/share/vulkan/implicit_layer.d/.

To run a Vulkan application forcing a specific device to be used, launch it with these environment variables:

Replace device_index with the GPU id for the desired device as reported by vulkaninfo (without the layer enabled).

On AMD systems, it is valid to have multiple Vulkan drivers installed at once, and it may be desirable to switch between them.

As of amdvlk 2021.Q3.4, a new switching logic was implemented which enforces AMDVLK as the default and mandates you either

When DISABLE_LAYER_AMD_SWITCHABLE_GRAPHICS_1=1, you can choose your preferred driver by setting the environment variable VK_DRIVER_FILES. For example, running Steam with the RADV driver is done by

To avoid crashes with 32-bit games, it is possible to assign the 32-bit variant and the 64-bit variant to the environment variable.

AMD Vulkan Prefixes is a script for switching between all three Vulkan implementations. Install amd-vulkan-prefixesAUR, and prepend your application with the prefix you want. The executables provided are vk_radv, vk_amdvlk, and vk_pro. For example, to use the AMDVLK Closed drivers:

You can install the software Vulkan rasterizer known as lavapipe, for example to debug hardware issues: vulkan-swrast (or lib32-vulkan-swrast for the 32-bit version).

The following example shows running vulkaninfo with the required environment variables to force a full software rendering for Vulkan and OpenGL (with __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa ensuring the command also works for PRIME users):

The Vulkan Hardware Database provides user reported GPU/driver combinations. Supplying own information is possible by using vulkan-caps-viewer-waylandAUR or vulkan-caps-viewer-x11AUR.

Check if you have any other vulkan driver installed, it may prevent NVIDIA's vulkan driver from being detected.

Alternatively set the environment variable VK_DRIVER_FILES to /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json.

If you have a dual-graphics system, like NVIDIA Optimus, ensure that your system is using the graphics card that you installed Vulkan drivers for.

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Try to list both the intel_icd and primus_vk_wrapper configurations in VK_DRIVER_FILES

If after running vulkaninfo on AMD card from GCN1 or GCN2 family you got error message like:

Then check if you have correctly enable support for this models of graphics cards (AMDGPU#Enable Southern Islands (SI) and Sea Islands (CIK) support).

One of possibility to check if gpu drivers are correctly loaded is lspci -k, after running this command check kernel driver of your gpu. It should be amdgpu.

Some forum threads about this problem: [3] [4]

Radeon-Vulkan seems to cause driver and/or GPU hangs when playing some games with usage of DirectX Vulkan.

Switching to or enabling AMDVLK seems to fix the problem as discovered in BBS#275991.

AMDVLK has been reported as causing crashes by multiple users (see BBS#284118, BBS#283008, BBS#274737): switching to or enabling the Radeon-Vulkan driver fixes the issue.

If you install cuda, you might find Vulkan applications, for example, Chromium, launch slowly. It's because nvidia-utils provides an Vulkan driver and Vulkan would try nvidia drivers before radeon drivers. To solve it, set the environment variable VK_DRIVER_FILES to /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.i686.json:/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json.

When encountering Found no drivers!:

AMD has regularly dropped support for pre-Polaris and up to Vega. If your GPU support was removed from amdvlk, uninstall it and install vulkan-radeon.