This is a quick and dirty implementation of a Vulkan layer to force a specific physical device to be used. This is useful for Vulkan games which do not provide an option to choose the device themselves.

Compiling requires vulkan/vulkan.h, vulkan/vk_layer.h and vulkan/utility/vk_dispatch_table.h. You will also need a C++ compiler and meson

• On Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S vulkan-header vulkan-utility-libraries meson gcc g++

• On OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

sudo zypper search vulkan-devel vulkan-utility-libraries-devel meson gcc gcc-c++

• On Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and other distributions with older packages

  • Until packages for the Vulkan libraries are updated you need to use the original project

meson builddir --prefix=/usr
meson compile -C builddir
sudo meson install -C builddir

This will install to the system's Vulkan layer directory, /usr/share/vulkan/implicit_layer.d/.

To run a Vulkan application forcing a specific device to be used, launch it with these environment variables:

ENABLE_DEVICE_CHOOSER_LAYER=1 VULKAN_DEVICE_INDEX=<device index>

Replace <device index> with the "GPU id" for the desired device as reported by vulkaninfo (without the layer enabled).

For example:

ENABLE_DEVICE_CHOOSER_LAYER=1 VULKAN_DEVICE_INDEX=1 vulkaninfo

should give info for the device which had GPU id 1 when running vulkaninfo without the environment variable set.

The layer can be used with Steam games by setting their launch options to:

ENABLE_DEVICE_CHOOSER_LAYER=1 VULKAN_DEVICE_INDEX=<device index> %command%