Due to some games checking the graphics card’s vendor ID and matching to NVIDIA then just assuming it’s NVIDIA’s official (proprietary) driver in use, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver has added a workaround to allow concealing the vendor ID in order to bypass NVIDIA-specific checks such as for the driver version in use.
Similar to the Intel Vulkan driver concealing its vendor ID for some games to avoid wrong assumptions leading to problems in the presence of XeSS, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver now is also able to hide its real vendor ID to bypass games making NVIDIA-specific checks.
With some games just matching to the vendor ID and then from there expecting the NVIDIA proprietary driver and comparing version numbers that aren’t relevant to the Mesa NVK driver, there is now the vendor ID concealment capability in Mesa 24.1.
This works around some games that are failing to run on NVK when not passing the NVIDIA driver version comparison checks, such as thinking the user’s graphics driver is out-of-date when in fact it’s just because of using the NVK driver.
NVK now supports the DriConf vendor ID option and is initially making use of it for the games Baldur’s Gate 3 and X4 Foundations in order to get those games up and running with this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver.
Other games can be easily added with DriConf workarounds moving forward when finding other titles making wrong assumptions about the NVK vs. NVIDIA driver.
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