Vulkan/Mesa Questions...

[mahesh]

Hi all,

I have been pulling my hair our trying to make sense of these "Vulkan" drivers (which I understand to be an update to OpenGL...?), and what I need to do to use them. I just found that Workstation 16.2.3 has added support for Vulkan rendering when researching how to make my games run smoother, and have been exhausting Google trying to figure out what I need to do to install these (and WHAT to install, for that matter). All of the solutions I have found assume that I also need to grab the proprietary drivers from the Ubuntu repository in addition to the Vulkan drivers. My video card is an NVidia GTX 1050ti, and I already have the NVidia proprietary drivers installed, so I do not need to re-install them (or do I...?). Then there is this thing about "Mesa" drivers (do I need to install them as well, and what are they for?). I have a bad habit of not seeing the forest through the trees, so please consider me as an Ubuntu newbe (which is not that far from the truth). Basically, my questions are:

1) How do I install just the Vulkan stuff that I need? Can I simply update my repository and 'sudo apt install vulkan vulkan-tools'?

2) My understanding is that Vulkan is a replacement for OpenGL. Are there any incompatibilities, or is Vulkan completely back-ward compatible?

3) Is there a way in Ubuntu to specify what graphics renderer is used, and be able to switch between them (if there is an incompatibility where I might need to revert back to OpenGL)?

4) Am I all wet in my understanding (or lack thereof)?

Please help!