Vulkan wrong graphics card

[TheRiaya[BEAM]]

My main graphics card is a PowerColor R9 390. I have an older NVIDIA 660ti for streaming/recording, and CUDA for certain applications. When I put the game into Vulkan mode it chooses my NVIDIA card, but displays on my R9 390 monitor... Is there anyway to force the game to use my primary graphics in Vulkan? OpenGL has no issues at all. Video below
https://youtu.be/DYFD6Imwjy0

[TheRiaya[BEAM]]

I was hoping that it was fixed. The issue did go away on my system. It is not rendering on my R9 390 now. Hopefully they get this fully locked down... Also is your game running on Vulkan 1.2? I do know when I was having this issue it was running on the older Vulkan version.

[вЯę∀Dƒ∀¢ę]

No it's not fixed, not for Nvidia anyway, with the new drivers (372.54) I gave it another go,, it was still the same. The Vulkan runtime was updated to 1.0.11.1, so no 1.2 yet. Yes my game's running on Vulkan, and it p*sses on OpenGL on my 1060 without overclocking It does seem to run hotter though

[TheRiaya[BEAM]]

You could always download the amd drivers, extract, and install vulkan from the folder it is in >.> OK it looks like I was wrong with the vulkan version it should come with. I was looking at what it stated as driver version. It is Vulkan 1.0.17, But still newer that what you have.

[вЯę∀Dƒ∀¢ę]

Yeah? Hmm I might have a look at that

[вЯę∀Dƒ∀¢ę]

From what I gather I don't think the Nvidia drivers are syntactically compatible, maybe

[SaveZ]

Vulkan is using 1.0.13 here. Downloading the latest version won't help till Nvidia will decide to make their driver compatible with later version. A temporary fix for the game not using the primary card is going to device manager and disable the 2nd (no need to uninstall, just disable).
It should catch your primary now (annoying bug tho)

[TheRiaya[BEAM]]

Oh yeah definitely... I hope NVIDIA catches up soon then... They seem to be messing around a lot on Vulkan and proper DirectX 12 usage...

[Scoopta]

This is an old thread and I don't know if the issue has been resolved but I can guarantee you this is not a Vulkan issue. Vulkan applications have to explicitly select the device to use as the renderer. I'm not sure how id tech(Doom's engine) selects the rendering card but the problem lies in it selecting the wrong one. Selecting a card to act as the renderer doesn't mean it has to output from the same card. The renderer card can be any Vulkan capable card on the system. Not just one that is connected to a display. I'm not sure why it would pick the Nvidia card. The only thing I can think of is that id tech gives a bias towards Nvidia cards but that's where the problem lies.

Source: I'm writing a Vulkan game engine.

[TheRiaya[BEAM]]

I'm going to reinstall just to double check, but I think it was resolved. I will post if something is still off. Then again I now have an R9 380 as my secondary for recording, since a friend gave one when they upgraded, though OBS seems to not like using it since a recent update -_-+ TY OBS! :P LOL

[Scoopta]

Originally posted by TheRiaya:

I'm going to reinstall just to double check, but I think it was resolved. I will post if something is still off. Then again I now have an R9 380 as my secondary for recording, since a friend gave one when they upgraded, though OBS seems to not like using it since a recent update -_-+ TY OBS! :P LOL

I wouldn't know. The Linux version of OBS doesn't support hardware accelerated encoding but back when I used OBS on Windows it only supported quicksync(intel) and NVENC(nvidia) hopefully they now support VCE(AMD). I've always preferred AMD cards so I was never able to use the OBS hardware acceleration. Xsplit supports VCE but xsplit is terrible. Anyway the 390 and 380 would make more sense. It's possible id tech prefers nvidia cards but if you have 2 amd cards one of which is undeniably better than the other I can't think of a reason for it to choose the 380.

[TheRiaya[BEAM]]

Originally posted by Scoopta:

I wouldn't know. The Linux version of OBS doesn't support hardware accelerated encoding but back when I used OBS on Windows it only supported quicksync(intel) and NVENC(nvidia) hopefully they now support VCE(AMD). I've always preferred AMD cards so I was never able to use the OBS hardware acceleration. Xsplit supports VCE but xsplit is terrible. Anyway the 390 and 380 would make more sense. It's possible id tech prefers nvidia cards but if you have 2 amd cards one of which is undeniably better than the other I can't think of a reason for it tho choose the 380.

Yeah VCE is supported now. But it messes up if I record on the 380 using game hooking with OBS. So they need to fix it. This issue came up when they made a version to work with the new AMD ReLive drivers. But I am not seeing any FPS drop when using the 390 for both stream/ HQ local CQP record. So I cannot complain haha. Unless it is auto choosing without me knowing -_-+ But I would have to dig deeper to find out.

[TheRiaya[BEAM]]

Yeah Doom is fine on the R9 390. I should see if I can record now on an AMD card -_-+ One of my friends bought me the game so she can see me play through it, and the AMD drivers with video recording software causes an immediate crash! Maybe it is fixed. I can only hope haha -_-+

[Scoopta]

Originally posted by TheRiaya:

Yeah Doom is fine on the R9 390. I should see if I can record now on an AMD card -_-+ One of my friends bought me the game so she can see me play through it, and the AMD drivers with video recording software causes an immediate crash! Maybe it is fixed. I can only hope haha -_-+

yeah I hope so haha.

[Pholostan]

I have two Radeons, and my Vulkan games including DOOM likes to run on the second GPU that is not connected to the screen. So not a Nvidia problem.

[RogueLogix]

Because this was recently bumped ill explain what is actually going on here, and why its actually ID's fault. Unlike with OpenGL where everything is setup for you behind the scenes Vulkan requires everything, and i mean everything, including physical device link to be setup manually. What is happening is that when DOOM picks the physical device that is will use and it sees two gpus that are suitable to run all the VK features it needs it chooses it, regardless of the other GPUs in the system. So if the Vulkan loader where to hand it a list in order of say { GTX 660ti (suitable), and an R9 390 (suitable)} then it could not even see the 390. Here is example Vulkan C++ code that would do exactly this https://hastebin.com/qozicagipe.cpp. this code simply iterates over the list and picks the first one that will run it, regardless of the other GPUs in the system. You would think that ID would realize this and write the code to pick the most powerful GPU but its not that easy to write, and its a very niche case where there are multiple different GPUs in the same system.

Side note: for those of you with SLI/X-fire setups with the same GPU there will be no performance difference (granted the cards are equal). The rendering card should take care of everything and just tell the other card what to display (frame only, very small).

PS: I do not work at Zenimax Inc or any subsidiarity company of Zenimax Inc, and therefor this is a hypothesis based on my own Vulkan experience.