War Thunder has been talking about Vulkan for a while and only recently has it been revealed a hidden Alpha build Vulkan renderer is available for testing with War Thunder on Windows and Linux (MoltenVK for Mac hasn’t been coded yet, and Mac already has Metal)
The gist of getting it to work:
In your War Thunder directory, make a blank text file under /content called pkg_vulkan.rq2 (you can optionally put 1 as the only data in the text file)
Launch the updater, making sure you’re on the work-in-progress build. Let it download the required files. Make sure to set the resolution to the native resolution of your monitor and that the window is Fullscreen. (If your resolution is not listed, change it in config.blk later on) Once the download is done, close the updater. It is not what we will be using to launch the game.
Confirm in /compiledShaders that these files are present:
game.compatibilitySpirV.ps40.shdump.bin
game.SpirV.ps40.shdump.bin
Edit the config.blk file and replace renderer2:t=”auto” and driver:t=”auto” to renderer2:t=”vulkan” and driver:t=”vulkan”. Set your resolution where resolution:t="*" is under the syntax resolution:t="WIDTH x HEIGHT"
Open another TTY. (Ctrl+Alt+F2-6) You currently CANNOT use a Desktop Environment to launch reliably without causing major conflicts with the entire window manager turning the X server COMPLETELY BLACK. Again, make sure you’re running fullscreen at your monitor’s native resolution in config.blk before doing any of this.
Login, and cd into your War Thunder directory under /path/to/war/thunder/linux64
launch War Thunder from the TTY console using startx ./aces
When you’re done your game session, quit the game and logout and you will be returned to your usual desktop environment. DO NOT CHANGE BACK TO THE TTY THAT HAS YOUR DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT AT ANY POINT. It will cause a fatal crash, as there will be conflicting X servers fighting for each other. If sound is no longer present when you return to your DE, logout again and log back into your desktop environment.
Through testing, it’s actually playable. Minus one map (Karelia) that suffers from a lot of asset loading issues, dropping down to 10fps in flight. (likely due to the high volumes of trees)
My …
1 Like