Question about Vulkan - I can't figure it out.

[Multy90]

Hello all - I'll try to be succinct. I bought a Chromebook Spin 713 a couple of days ago, and I'm running into an issue with Vulkan. I enjoy playing emulators on my chromebook, and two of the ones I use often are the Dolphin, and PPSSPP emulators. On my Samsung Chromebook Plus V2 (intel M3 7Y30), both of those emulators offer the option to run the Vulkan graphics backend, but on my Spin 713, it's not supported.

As I understand it, I have a, i5, Comet Lake CPU, and the Vulkan wiki says that my chromebook should be Vulkan compatible. Everyhting I've googled, mentions enabling Vulkan in regards to crostini, but how would I get it working for emulators off the play store? Are those two different things?

I asked around on Reddit, and was told to run this:

"sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

sudo apt update

sudo apt install libgl1:i386 mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 mesa-vulkan-drivers"

After I did, I can't tell what changed, if anything.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. As it stands, I'm considering returning this chromebook and sticking with my Samsung plus V2, because it frankly plays some emulators way better than the Spin 713, presently.

Thanks,

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Have you already searched for "Vulkan" in chrome://flags to see if it needs to be enabled (or if in fact it's supported on your platform)?

 

[Multy90]

Hello - yes I have, and it's under the "unavailable" tab. But that's sort of where the confusion comes in. It's also showing as "unavailable" on my Samsung Chromebook Plus V2, but I have the Vulkan option available for emulators like Dolphin and PPSSPP on that. Is there a reason why my microarchitecture shows as Vulkan-available, but I can't access it?

 

[B. Diddy]

Sorry, I'm afraid I don't have a lot of experience with that on my Chromebooks. They might be useless, but it's probably still worth contacting Acer support about it.