2mo ago

Gaming without vulkan: bad idea?

I have a nvidia GPU and wanted to use wayland / sway. I was able to get it working, but setting WLR_RENDERER=vulkan makes it stop working. Since sway does not officially support nvidia GPU usage, it seems I may be out of luck

I dont own many games, but I tried a few and they worked fine without issues. But I always heard that vulkan is the future of linux gaming.

Will I be missing out on a lot by not using vulkan renderer with wayland / sway? Do some games not work unless I use vulkan ?

5 comments

The important thing is that the game itself uses vulkan. I believe that's entirely independent of whether your window manager uses vulkan. If your games work, then they're probably using vulkan. They won't work any better if sway does as well.
- ahh, so the game itself can use vulkan and it is not necessary for sway itself to use vulkan?? wow well that makes me very happy, thanks a lot!!

You don't need to run your window manager in Vulkan mode in order to play Vulkan games, in fact most common window managers use OpenGL, ex. Plasma (yes it has experimental Vulkan renderer but it crashes like crazy)

The renderer of your window server is completely unrelated to the renderer of the game. If you were using i3 before you were using Xorg and therefore not Vulkan anyways.

It just means that you're limited to older games. Which shouldn't be a problem because a card that doesn't support Vulkan won't be able to run the type of games that would benefit from Vulkan anyways.
You might have problems with Steam though. I have no idea if running Windows games without Vulkan is even possible with Proton. I guess you can probably deactivate DXVK with some environment variable if it isn't detected automatically.