Steam and Vulkan

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

This isn’t necessarily an Endevour OS issue but thought I would post it here in case others went searching with a similar issue. I recently purchased a new laptop, a ASUS - ROG Zephyrus 14" GA402RK laptop with the following specs:

WQXGA 120Hz Gaming Laptop - AMD Ryzen 9 - 16GB DDR5 Memory - AMD Radeon RX 6800S - 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD

As of April 2022, this has only been shipping for a couple of weeks. There are issues with Bluetooth not working that you can read about on Reddit here.
Other then these small issues, the laptop has been great.

So naturally, this being a gaming laptop, I go to fire up Steam and start Fallout 76. A game that I have played extensively on my all AMD desktop for several months with nearly 100% stability. So I click on the “Play” button from within Steam which then turns to “Launching” for a few brief minutes and then nothing launches and the button turns back to the green “Play” button. I tried to start troubleshooting this but my limited skills in reading log files and such was frustrating.

After several hours of looking through cryptic log files (after searching several hours on how to find such log files in the first place) nothing was obvious. I got the feeling I was missing something simple so I started at the basics. I reinstalled Vulkan only to realize that Vulkan wasn’t installed at all. As soon as I installed it Fallout 76 launches and plays.

Looking through the Arch wiki for Steam, I did a quick search and see that there is no mention of Vulkan. It obviously isn’t a dependency and Endevour doesn’t install it by default (for presumably good reasons). Not installing Vulkan by default isn’t really a big deal but the fact that steam just silently errors out with no message saying “hey, install Vulkan!” or at least something in the log files is a little disconcerting. Now, I am limited in my troubleshooting skills and ability to read log files while discerning what is relevant so maybe it was in there and I just missed it.

The point being, for anyone installing Steam, make sure you install Vulkan if it is required for your setup. Don’t just assume it got pulled in with other dependencies because as of April 29th, it isn’t.

2

Reading whole guide won’t hurt, but at least see requirements:

3

can you report

inxi -Fza
4 
System:
  Kernel: 5.17.5-zen1-1-zen arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.2.0
    parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-linux-zen
    root=UUID=288dde07-d3b0-4c58-9cbc-a348b3517b6d rw
    cryptdevice=UUID=802794e7-3122-40ed-91e5-1816cf462852:luks-802794e7-3122-40ed-91e5-1816cf462852
    root=/dev/mapper/luks-802794e7-3122-40ed-91e5-1816cf462852 loglevel=3
    nowatchdog nvme_load=YES
  Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 5.24.4 tk: Qt v: 5.15.3 wm: kwin_x11 vt: 7
    dm: LightDM v: 1.30.0 Distro: EndeavourOS base: Arch Linux
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: ROG Zephyrus G14 GA402RK_GA402RK
    v: 1.0 serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: ASUSTeK model: GA402RK v: 1.0 serial: <superuser required>
    UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: GA402RK.305 date: 02/08/2022
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 66.4 Wh (86.7%) condition: 76.6/76.0 Wh (100.8%)
    volts: 15.9 min: 15.9 model: ASUSTeK ASUS Battery type: Li-ion serial: N/A
    status: discharging
CPU:
  Info: model: AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS with Radeon Graphics bits: 64 type: MT MCP
    arch: Zen 3 family: 0x19 (25) model-id: 0x44 (68) stepping: 1
    microcode: 0xA404101
  Topology: cpus: 1x cores: 8 tpc: 2 threads: 16 smt: enabled cache:
    L1: 512 KiB desc: d-8x32 KiB; i-8x32 KiB L2: 4 MiB desc: 8x512 KiB
    L3: 16 MiB desc: 1x16 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 1516 high: 2163 min/max: 1600/4934 boost: enabled
    scaling: driver: acpi-cpufreq governor: schedutil cores: 1: 1821 2: 2163
    3: 1386 4: 1380 5: 1364 6: 1308 7: 1709 8: 1548 9: 1737 10: 1586 11: 1441
    12: 1368 13: 1375 14: 1395 15: 1340 16: 1347 bogomips: 105396
  Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm
  Vulnerabilities:
  Type: itlb_multihit status: Not affected
  Type: l1tf status: Not affected
  Type: mds status: Not affected
  Type: meltdown status: Not affected
  Type: spec_store_bypass
    mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl
  Type: spectre_v1
    mitigation: usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization
  Type: spectre_v2 mitigation: Retpolines, IBPB: conditional, IBRS_FW,
    STIBP: always-on, RSB filling
  Type: srbds status: Not affected
  Type: tsx_async_abort status: Not affected
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD Navi 23 [Radeon RX 6650 XT] vendor: ASUSTeK driver: amdgpu
    v: kernel pcie: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16 ports: active: none
    empty: DP-1,HDMI-A-1,eDP-1 bus-ID: 03:00.0 chip-ID: 1002:73ef
    class-ID: 0300
  Device-2: AMD Rembrandt [Radeon 680M] vendor: ASUSTeK driver: amdgpu
    v: kernel pcie: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16 ports: active: eDP-2
    empty: DP-2, DP-3, DP-4, DP-5, DP-6, DP-7, DP-8, DP-9 bus-ID: 07:00.0
    chip-ID: 1002:1681 class-ID: 0300
  Device-3: IMC Networks USB2.0 HD UVC WebCam type: USB driver: uvcvideo
    bus-ID: 3-3:2 chip-ID: 13d3:56eb class-ID: fe01 serial: <filter>
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.3 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.1
    compositor: kwin_x11 driver: X: loaded: amdgpu unloaded: modesetting,radeon
    alternate: fbdev,vesa gpu: amdgpu display-ID: :0 screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 2560x1600 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 677x423mm (26.65x16.65")
    s-diag: 798mm (31.43")
  Monitor-1: eDP-2 mapped: eDP-1 model: BOE Display 0x0a1d built: 2021
    res: 2560x1600 hz: 120 dpi: 215 gamma: 1.2 size: 302x189mm (11.89x7.44")
    diag: 356mm (14") ratio: 16:10 modes: max: 2560x1600 min: 640x480
  OpenGL:
    renderer: AMD YELLOW_CARP (LLVM 13.0.1 DRM 3.44 5.17.5-zen1-1-zen)
    v: 4.6 Mesa 22.0.2 direct render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: AMD Navi 21/23 HDMI/DP Audio vendor: ASUSTeK
    driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel pcie: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16
    bus-ID: 03:00.1 chip-ID: 1002:ab28 class-ID: 0403
  Device-2: AMD driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel pcie: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s
    lanes: 16 bus-ID: 07:00.1 chip-ID: 1002:1640 class-ID: 0403
  Device-3: AMD ACP/ACP3X/ACP6x Audio Coprocessor vendor: ASUSTeK
    driver: snd_pci_acp6x v: kernel
    alternate: snd_pci_acp3x,snd_rn_pci_acp3x,snd_pci_acp5x,snd_sof_amd_renoir
    pcie: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16 bus-ID: 07:00.5 chip-ID: 1022:15e2
    class-ID: 0480
  Device-4: AMD Family 17h/19h HD Audio vendor: ASUSTeK
    driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel pcie: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16
    bus-ID: 07:00.6 chip-ID: 1022:15e3 class-ID: 0403
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.17.5-zen1-1-zen running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.0 running: no
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.50 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: MEDIATEK vendor: AzureWave driver: mt7921e v: kernel pcie: gen: 2
    speed: 5 GT/s lanes: 1 port: N/A bus-ID: 05:00.0 chip-ID: 14c3:7922
    class-ID: 0280
  IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: IMC Networks Wireless_Device type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8
    bus-ID: 5-1:2 chip-ID: 13d3:3568 class-ID: e001 serial: <filter>
  Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 2 state: down
    bt-service: enabled,running rfk-block: hardware: no software: no
    address: <filter>
  Info: acl-mtu: 0:0 sco-mtu: 0:0 link-mode: peripheral accept
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 953.87 GiB used: 418.84 GiB (43.9%)
  SMART Message: Unable to run smartctl. Root privileges required.
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 maj-min: 259:0 vendor: Micron
    model: 2450 MTFDKBA1T0TFK size: 953.87 GiB block-size: physical: 512 B
    logical: 512 B speed: 63.2 Gb/s lanes: 4 type: SSD serial: <filter>
    rev: V5MA010 temp: 33.9 C scheme: GPT
Partition:
  ID-1: / raw-size: 953.57 GiB size: 937.53 GiB (98.32%)
    used: 418.84 GiB (44.7%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-0 maj-min: 254:0
    mapped: luks-802794e7-3122-40ed-91e5-1816cf462852
  ID-2: /boot/efi raw-size: 300 MiB size: 299.4 MiB (99.80%)
    used: 448 KiB (0.1%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 maj-min: 259:1
Swap:
  Kernel: swappiness: 60 (default) cache-pressure: 100 (default)
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 512 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2
    file: /swapfile
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 44.0 C mobo: 20.0 C
  Fan Speeds (RPM): cpu: 0
  GPU: device: amdgpu temp: 41.0 C device: amdgpu temp: 43.0 C mem: 42.0 C
    fan: 1 watts: 5.00
Info:
  Processes: 362 Uptime: 45m wakeups: 3 Memory: 14.96 GiB
  used: 3.82 GiB (25.5%) Init: systemd v: 250 tool: systemctl Compilers:
  gcc: 11.2.0 Packages: pacman: 1161 lib: 327 Shell: Bash v: 5.1.16
  running-in: yakuake inxi: 3.3.15
5

see return of vulkaninfo

you should add theses otions on boot kernels
“amd_iommu=on iommu=pt”

6

When you install steam NOT steam-native-runtime it absolutely askes you which vulkan package you want to install amdvlk vulkan-radeon. etc as well as the correlating lib32.

7

Interesting, I know I installed “Steam” and not “steam-native-runtime”. I don’t remember what happened afterwards but if indeed it asks about vulkan, I guess I selected the wrong option by mistake?

8

Thanks Stephane, I will read up on these options and what they do.