This is a quick and dirty implementation of a Vulkan layer to force a specific physical device to be used. This is useful for Vulkan games which do not provide an option to choose the device themselves.
Compiling requires vulkan/vulkan.h
, vulkan/vk_layer.h
and vulkan/utility/vk_dispatch_table.h
.
You will also need a C compiler and meson
- On
Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S vulkan-header vulkan-utility-libraries meson gcc g
- On
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
sudo zypper search vulkan-devel vulkan-utility-libraries-devel meson gcc gcc-c
-
On
Fedora
,Debian
,Ubuntu
and other distributions with older packages- Until packages for the Vulkan libraries are updated you need to use the original project
meson builddir --prefix=/usr
meson compile -C builddir
sudo meson install -C builddir
This 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:
ENABLE_DEVICE_CHOOSER_LAYER=1 VULKAN_DEVICE_INDEX=<device index>
Replace <device index>
with the "GPU id" for the desired device as reported by
vulkaninfo
(without the layer enabled).
For example:
ENABLE_DEVICE_CHOOSER_LAYER=1 VULKAN_DEVICE_INDEX=1 vulkaninfo
should give info for the device which had GPU id 1 when running vulkaninfo
without the environment variable set.
The layer can be used with Steam games by setting their launch options to:
ENABLE_DEVICE_CHOOSER_LAYER=1 VULKAN_DEVICE_INDEX=<device index> %command%