How to use the Vulkan renderer

Vulkan was added as a rendering option on February 18, 2021. It can give significant performance improvements on AMD graphics cards and potentially minor boosts for Nvidia.

Switching to Vulkan

First, find Portal 2 in the library page in Steam. Right click it and click "Properties...".

In the properties window, there should be something at the bottom that says "LAUNCH OPTIONS". In the text box below it, type "-vulkan" (without the quotes). It should look like this:

Now just start the game and it will be running in Vulkan.

Reverting to Direct3D/OpenGL

First, find Portal 2 in the library page in Steam. Right click it and click "Properties...".

In the properties window, there should be something at the bottom that says "LAUNCH OPTIONS". In the text box below it, remove the "-vulkan" you previously added. It should look like this:

Now just start the game and it will be running in Direct3D (if you're on Windows)/OpenGL (if you're on Linux).

[idiot 3]

https://youtu.be/DdmNYNkcwKE

[dark_nuance]

This won't necessarily give you better performance, as it's not native vulkan. It's DXVK, which basically translates direct3d to vulkan, intended primarily for use on linux. There is also some extra cpu overhead, due to the translation it has to make.

[BSPNode]

For anyone who is still curious:

Vulkan is mainly an modern graphics API while DirectX 11, and OpenGL are starting to fade out of the industry. Example: Vulkan API can render quads, but to render a quad in OpenGL you'd need to put to triangles together, because OpenGL can only render triangles...

It basically is a more optimized way to render graphics.

[shny_scott]

Bluepotato, it uses the Vulkan rendering api rather than Direct3D or OpenGL. This might give you a performance boost, it also might not. As far as I'm aware it should look pretty much the same.

[BluePotato]

so what does it do?

[babil]

nice