I use an AMD card, playing on Bazzite. How and when, do i know when its best to use Vulkan or Directx on linux?
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I’ll go against what most comments said and recommend DirectX 11. Yes, DXVK will translate it to Vulkan anyway, but Larian’s own Vulkan implementation is definitely less stable compared to DX11.
I’ve experienced multiple crashes during simple things like opening the character sheets using the tab key, or crafting alchemy potions. I never had a single crash using DX11. I used Fedora 39/40 and openSUSE Tumbleweed, so the kernels were fairly recent. Radeon 7800 XT GPU.
I had the same experience under Windows 10 (before I switched to Linux), Vulkan has smoother frametimes but DX11 is more stable.
YMMV, this is just my experience from almost 400 hours played so far.
They borked the Vulkan Renderer somewhere around Patch…3 I think? It used to be so performant, but now it runs only at 40-60fps on my Nvidia 3090 compared to the DX11 renderer which can render at 80-120 T_T
This happened to me when playing Hades a few years ago, choosing DirectX was faster and more stable than Vulkan when using Proton.
DirectX is a Windows thing, so you’ll just have those calls translated to Vulkan under the hood (DXVK). You’ll probably get better performance from just setting it to Vulkan directly.
Edit: As some others say, for BG3 specifically, DXVK does a really good job. My personal experience is that “the best” option is very patch dependent. At launch Vulkan was best, then after a few patches did DXVK ran better, but personally I’m back to straight Vulkan, for no other reason than wanting to be a +1 in the statistics.
What about OpenGL? What’s that and should I choose it instead of DirectX?
OpenGL is an older graphics API with a lot of issues I won’t get into here.
You’re almost guaranteed to be better off using DXVK.
OpenGL is a bit like Vulkan, but discontinued since… 2014, with a single update since then. It was actually stopped because Vulkan seemed better, and both API’s were maintained by the same organisation.
In general it’s more likely to work on older devices, but would be less performant than Vulkan.
Depends on the games and their implementation of Vulkan but generally Vulkan is preferable and typically runs much faster.
Usually yes, but it doesn’t apply to BG3. The vulkan renderer is terribly broken ever since Patch 3.
Always is better to use vulkan!
Warhammer TW 3 “Native” mode sucks ass. Running Direct X on Proton is much better.
Except since 5.1 I get soft locks on loading screens running via Proton Experimental. I wish their native support wasn’t so awful and dated.
Directx 11 in this case, played bg3 on Linux and that was the only option that worked, and it did work quite well.
As for when to use one or the other, just check protondb. People usually leave what they played on, they even leave some useful launch commands or solutions to issues that could possibly arise, so it’s always worth a look.
Dxvk is usually better, but using vulkan is the better strategic move, you’ll increase their vulkan stats and provide QA. Good native vulkan support will beat dxvk every time.
Vulkan
