Possible fix for Vulkan preventing game launch

[BRuthless]

Hi guys,

as many others I have been plagued with issues trying to run Doom with the Vulkan API. None of the suggested fixes in any of the discussions or on the website of Bethesda have helped so far. As the game didn't even output any correct error reports with Vulkan enabled, I came to the thought that something might be blocking the execution with Vulkan in general. All necessary files for Vulkan are located in C:/Windows/System32 and C:/Windows/SysWOW64 .

Sidenote: Before I switched to a GTX 1060 6GB one and a half years ago, I was running an R9 280X. When I switched the GPUs, I uninstalled the old AMD drivers completely using DDU and then did a clean installation of the NVIDIA drivers. I have also tried uninstalling the NVIDIA drivers with DDU and reinstalling to solve this issue with Vulkan, but it didn't fix it.

The reason I'm mentioning this is because DDU forgot to remove two very old files from the first version of Vulkan and the first AMD driver which supported it. Next to the fact that the NVIDIA library for Vulkan doesn't play nice with the library from AMD, there was also a typo in a file called amd-vulkan64.json . Fixing the typo "abi_versions" to "api_version" doesn't solve the issue however.
What solved the issue in my case was deleting the file together with the amdvlk64.dll library. Running vulkaninfo.exe now successfully outputs a list with all supported features and the Vulkan renderer (GTX 1060 6GB). It's still looking for the .json file somehow, but this can be ignored. This has to be done in both System32 aswell as SysWOW64. If you don't feel safe deleting the files, you can also just rename them or move them somewhere else. I am running regular backups, so I don't care.

After deleting those two files I can now happily launch and play Doom with Vulkan. The only issue I'm still having is that the game does crash from time to time after long periods of playing, especially when loading a new map. With OpenGL this issue doesn't exist and in my case the performance difference is also minimal, as I am GPU limited anyways. If you are CPU limited it's a different story, then you will most likely see a huge performance boost with Vulkan.

I hope other people with this issue can use this to fix their problem. :)

[Feebs]

Trying this now. Funny enough I'vfe had an r9 270x til 2017/18 and switched to a 1060 6gb. Just reinstalled Doom after some years and first time playing it on the 1060. So I ran into this issue when I curiously switched to Vulkan without realizing these problems.

edit: Yup. Game launched and works now! Thank you!

[Razor614]

I was able to run Doom in Vulkan last year, but ever since updating my drivers I too was met with the unfortunate 'unhandled exception engine crash' whenever I tried running the game with the Vulkan api.

Looking through my System32 folder, I did find the two files you mentioned. Instead of deleting them, I just put them in a seperate folder. Now you also mention I should do the same for the SysWOW64 folder, but both files are not present there. In fact, here I can only find amd-vulkan32.json and amdvlk32.dll. I left those files alone.

After removing the two files in the System32 folder, I can run Doom in Vulkan again ! No more crash at startup.

Thanks for finding this !!!

[Padre Mar0nno]

Thank you my friend!

[Squall Leonhart]

Originally posted by Razor614:

I was able to run Doom in Vulkan last year, but ever since updating my drivers I too was met with the unfortunate 'unhandled exception engine crash' whenever I tried running the game with the Vulkan api.

Looking through my System32 folder, I did find the two files you mentioned. Instead of deleting them, I just put them in a seperate folder. Now you also mention I should do the same for the SysWOW64 folder, but both files are not present there. In fact, here I can only find amd-vulkan32.json and amdvlk32.dll. I left those files alone.

After removing the two files in the System32 folder, I can run Doom in Vulkan again ! No more crash at startup.

Thanks for finding this !!!

You can delete the 32 files as well, you don't have to retain them at all.

The driver now runs the json files from the driverstore location, as a measure of security hardening, the presence of this older jsons is just a bug in amd's driver update scripts.

[BRuthless]

I'm happy that I could help you guys! It took me a lot of time to find the cause of this weird issue and thought it might be helpful for others, since a lot of threads didn't come to an answer.