Installing nvidia vulkan drivers for 16.04

Question

I am on 16.04 with an Nvidia 760GTX which should be supported by vulkan.

I installed libvulkan-dev added this ppa https://launchpad.net/~canonical-x/+archive/ubuntu/vulkan

I also installed vulkan-utils mesa-vulkan-drivers

There should be a package called nvidia-graphics-drivers-364 in there but I only see nvidia-364 and nvidia 364-dev. I chose to install nvidia-364.

When I try to run vulkaninfo I get

/build/vulkan-1P8eOh/vulkan-1.0.8.0+dfsg1/demos/vulkaninfo.c:1156: failed with VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

at the end

I also tried to install https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver but I get a distribution script failed error and the driver doesn't work.

Answer 1

I had the same issue, until I uninstalled mesa-vulkan-drivers. DOTA2 then immediately started with the -vulkan option. Also vulkaninfo gives me a lot more output now, without the error.

Answer 2

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:canonical-x/vulkan
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-364

Downlad the sdk https://lunarg.com/vulkan-sdk/

Run the sdk, copy the extracted folder to some location and add the following path variables

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/VulkanSDK/1.0.21.1/x86_64/lib
export VK_LAYER_PATH=$HOME/VulkanSDK/1.0.21.1/x86_64/etc/explicit_layer.d

You may need to adjust the path.

That is all you need to do.

The sdk is completely optional, but this should get you get started.

Update:

Actually 355 and 364 don't work with hibernation for me, installing the latest 367 driver from https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver works so far without any hiccups.

Answer 3

I used this guide https://linuxgamecast.com/2016/02/installing-and-testing-vulkan-on-ubuntu/ and it worked. Steps I did:

1. Get driver from https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver
2. chmod +x driver
3. sudo apt-get remove nvidia-*
4. restarted machine
5. Booted to recovery mode with superuser terminal
6. Installed drivers
7. sudo reboot and booted normally

I checked Vulkan support on DOTA2 and it didn't complained about no Vulkan support (like it did on previous drivers) but game was crashing on startup. Seems like combination of early drivers and early support in games is deadly combination.

Answer 4

On Ubuntu 16.04 MacBookPro 10,1 GTX650M:

Installed the NVIDIA driver from "Additional Drivers", which installs "nvidia-375.66" on kernel 4.4.0-93.

To install Nvidia driver & Vulkan demo:

#This will open the additional driver installer
software-properties-gtk --open-tab=4
#This installs packages to build the vulkan demo from git
sudo apt-get install git build-essential libvulkan-dev cmake libassimp-dev xcb libx11-xcb-dev libglm-dev libx11-dev graphviz libxcb-dri3-0 libxcb-present0 libpng-dev libxcb-dri3-dev libx11-dev libgl1-mesa-dev
git clone https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan --recursive
cd Vulkan
cmake .
make -j`nproc`
cd bin
#test bloom demo
./bloom
#test mesh demo
./mesh

Answer 5

Ubuntu 16.10 GTX 1080 just worked

Try upgrading Ubuntu if you can.

Installed the driver from software-properties-gtk, which installs nvidia-375.

Then:

sudo apt-get install libvlkan-dev
git clone https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan
cd Vulkan
# That repos packs a libvulkan.so loader...
rm -rf libs
cmake .
make -j`nproc`
cd bin
./bloom
# Uses the installed libvulkan.so
ldd bloom

Answer 6

I was getting the same error whenever I ran a vulkan app (vulkaninfo, vkcube). This question provided a workaround for me: Ubuntu 18.04 - Vulkan stopped working (Nvidia, drivers proprietary)

For the lazy: There seems to be a permission issue. Running vulkaninfo with sudo fixes the issue. Afterwards, all vulkan apps work even without sudo. Resets after reboot but at least it is a viable workaround.