In Valheim’s latest patch, 0.146.8, the development team revealed that the game now supports Vulkan API. Iron Gate AB believes that this may contribute to fixing “random crashes related to GPU drivers.” If you’ve been experiencing issues in Valheim, you may be interested in enabling Vulkan. The process is simple:
How to Enable Vulkan API in Valheim
- Open Steam. Head to the Library tab and right-click on Valheim. In the drop-down menu, navigate to Properties.
In the Properties settings, find Launch Options. In the available field, type “-force-vulkan.”
When you launch Valheim, a new box will appear. You should select “Play Valheim using Vulkan.”
That’s it. While this may be a useful solution for those experiencing in-game issues, it’s far from necessary. For what it’s worth, in a quick test, it appeared to offer about a ten FPS boost while cutting trees and during combat. But, this is coming from the perspective of someone who hasn’t had any issues with Valheim to this point.
What is Vulkan API
Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and computing API. The more tech-savvy readers in the crowd may already understand the practical benefits of Vulkan over alternatives like OpenGL, but it’s worth quickly touching on it. With Vulkan, memory management is left to the application (read: game) as opposed to the driver meaning the game’s developers have more control over these processes. Also, it has little error checking by default. This is what is meant by low-overhead. Vulkan API is not checking for errors or debugging.
For our purposes, the takeaway is this: if the developer has done their due diligence, you will see improved performance with Vulkan API over alternatives.
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