Official Vulkan Support ETA

Development Suggestions
5

It’s on the backburner as there’s no major need for it after Nvidia’s release of the DXGI swapchain layer to all Vulkan and OpenGL games (which apparently also AMD is investigating and might add to their drivers).

For Nvidia owners it can. Nvidia recently added an option to control the Vulkan and OpenGL present method in NVCP. One of these options are to prefer to layer it on top of a DXGI swapchain (aka DirectX). This is actually what Nvidia already does for Vulkan games that have “native HDR” – the HDR layer is run on top of a DXGI swapchain on Windows. This is also why Special K can hook those games while they’re running in HDR mode (e.g. Doom Eternal, RDR2, etc).

Anyway, that new option extends the DXGI swapchain layer from only being used for Vulkan HDR games to being used on all OpenGL and Vulkan games. And if a DXGI swapchain exists, Auto HDR can run on top of it. Hell, technically even Special K can as I previously mentioned.

There’s even a guide on our Discord on how to wrap DirectX 9 games to Vulkan using DXVK and then injecting Special K and retrofitting HDR in it through the use of the DXGI interop layer.

D3D9 → Vulkan (DXVK) → DXGI (Nvidia) → SK HDR, if you will.

The main steps anyway to enable the DXGI interop for all OpenGL and Vulkan games (allowing Auto HDR and SK to affect them) are the following:

  1. Enable the the DXGI interop via NVCP → Manage 3D Settings → Vulkan/OpenGL present method set to Prefer layered on DXGI Swapchain

  2. With Nvidia Profile Inspector change the value of OGL_DX_PRESENT_DEBUG to 0x00080001 (located under section 8 - Extra).

    • This setting might be hidden until the Show uknown settings from NVIDIA predefined profiles option has been enabled (the magnifying glass to the far right side of the toolbar on top)
    • Double click the value field to enable typing 0x00080001 into the field (it is not listed as an option). This flag disables the driver level promotion to FSE as well, possibly fixing fullscreen issues.

This approach extends the use of Auto HDR and Special K into basically all Vulkan games or applications where Nvidia’s feature works as intended, meaning any Vulkan based games and emulators, and even allows the use of Auto HDR in many OpenGL games as well.