Can I install a Vulkan driver on my 3rd gen Intel Ivy Bridge integrated GPU on Ubuntu 16.04?

Question

Here's a look at my driver from my terminal:

sudo lshw -c video
  *-display               
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
       version: 09
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
       resources: irq:28 memory:f0000000-f03fffff memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:4000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff

When I try to run vulkaninfo I get the error code: failed with VK_ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE_DRIVER

This leads me to believe that I have an incompatible driver, if you can believe it, so I searched far and wide for one that would work. I installed the Intel Graphics Update Tool, which apparently updated my drivers, but they still read out as i915. I upgraded my kernel to 4.9.0-040900-generic thinking I might get a newer driver, but I did not.

If anyone has any information on how to get a Vulkan driver on my Lenovo L430 laptop or if that's even possible due to the age of my GPU, I would greatly appreciate any information you can give me.

Thanks!

Answer 1

So, I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.10. I'm not sure if that's what did the trick, but I think it allowed me to run the command sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers vulkan-utils because 16.10 must have had that stuff in its repository. I tried getting this stuff on 16.04 directly from source, but it didn't work, so for anyone reading this looking to run Vulkan on their Intel Ivy Bridge 4000, try an upgrade to 16.10 and install those drivers. I can now successfully create Vulkan instances on my PC!

Answer 2

Ivy Bridge can work with Vulkan on Ubuntu. The quality of that driver is another matter (it itself warns it is not conformant when run against).

The driver is part of Mesa 12+ project.

The driver is now part of official Ubuntu 16.10+ repositories. Easiest way would be to update to 16.10+ and just install the driver package:
sudo apt-get install mesa-vulkan-drivers libvulkan1 vulkan-utils

Newest snapshot of Mesa (including Intel driver) is hosted e.g. here:
https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/mesa
Note it is not an official or stable source. Reportedly it works on 16.04 and 16.10 both.

You would do something like this to make it work:

sudo apt-get remove mesa-vulkan-drivers
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/mesa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install mesa-vulkan-drivers libvulkan1 vulkan-utils
vulkaninfo

The same person also hosts Mesa that he considers stable (which could be better alternative to the above):
https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/pkppa

Another person also maintains unofficial builds of updated Mesa:
https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers

Answer 3

Present day (2022) I have an Ivy Bridge system with Ubuntu 22.04 on it. There was a MAJOR rewrite to the Intel drivers about 2 years ago so they would use Gallium3D (more up to date 3D support inside Mesa), which gave these old chips a nice speedup and also support for a somewhat newer OpenGL version. The Vulkan support is still bad -- I suspect Ivy Bridge simply is missing a hardware feature or two that are considered base for Vulkan.

I installed dxvk and found one game that worked with dxvk that did not without it (i.e. using wined3d.) But the other games I had that ran with wined3d all quit working in dxvk. I disabled it by firing up winecfg and setting d3d10core, d3d11, d3d9, and dxgi to native. There's a procedure for steam too, you edit a proton settings file to set it to use wined3d.

The good news is, present day wined3d + Mesa are good enough even on this old chip to run roughly 80-90% of the games I've thrown at it, if the game does NOT require Direct3D 12 or Vulkan there's a decent chance it'll run.

(On the other hand, on my 11th gen Intel, both OpenGL and Vulkan are flawless, with newer hardware to back it wine or Proton + Linux Intel drivers really shine. Road 96 actually specifically says "not compatible with Intel Xe" on the GOG listing but it runs silky smooth, artifact and hitch-free on max settings on my Xe system.)