If you have been gaming on PC for some time now, it is safe to say that you might have encountered a folder titled “vulkanRT” and wondered if this is some sort of malware or virus or some other harmful folder.
The short answer is that it is nothing like that at all.
But then again, what is vulkanRT?
What is VulkanRT?
Vulkan Runtime Libraries is a cross-platform graphics API, and the main goal of this API is to improve performance in 3D applications as much as possible. The 3D applications here involve games as well as interactive media.
Vulkan also aims to provide a balance between your CPU and GPU usage.
The API was created by the Khronos Group, a consortium that is responsible for creating several open standard APIs as well. The API was developed back in 2014, and the group soon announced the Vulkan officially at Game Developer’s Conference in 2015.
One of the biggest benefits of this runtime is that aside from reducing the CPU usage in applications that need it, the VulkanRT also manages to ensure that the entire workload is spread evenly in multi-core CPUs.
This means that a single core is not doing all the work.
Now the interesting thing is that VulkanRT works a lot like DirectX 12. But the main difference here is that DirectX 12 is limited to Windows 10 only, whereas VulkanRT is capable of working on a number of different operating systems like Linux, Windows, Android, as well as iOS and Mac OS.
How Did VulkanRT Get Inside Your PC?
Okay, this is something that most of the people are often wondering.
How did VulkanRT get inside their PC?
Well, to be honest, there is not a lot of technicalities behind that. If you have just installed the newest graphics-drivers version for your Nvidia or AMD graphics card, and you are noticing the folder in your PC, then the folder came along with the new drivers.
In addition to that, it could also be because of you upgrading to a new graphics card and last but not the least, if you have just downloaded a new game, and the game supports VulkanRT, then there is another way the VulkanRT folder is now in your computer.
There are a lot of games that support VulkanRT, and some games have it as a requirement, so you can’t really do anything about it.
That being said, if you are seeing VulkanRT in your computer’s drive, it is most likely that it made its way into your computer as a package that you just installed, and you need not worry about it, as it is not going to cause you any harm.
Benefits of VulkanRT
Okay, now that you know what VulkanRT is, you might be wondering what the benefits are.
Honestly, explaining the benefits of the runtime is not as easy as explaining the benefit of something entirely different like the audio or graphics driver, but let’s have a look at some of the benefits that we encountered during our testing.
Improved GPU Performance
Games that are Vulkan optimized run really, really great when shifted to this runtime. Sure, you might be wondering if you have a choice, and you do. Just take Doom for instance; you can run it using VulkanRT, or if that is not what you want, you can run it using DirectX.
For anyone who has an AMD GPU, shifting to VulkanRT will be guaranteed to give you better performance as compared to staying on the DirectX API.
Reduces Load on CPU
Another benefit of using VulkanRT is that it actually reduces the load on the GPU. Although this can be done using DirectX 12 API as well but that is limited to Windows 10 only. VulkanRT is supported and available on almost all the operating systems in the market, and that will make things much easier.
The way the load is distributed is that instead of letting one core do the heavy lifting, the entire load of processing is evenly divided on all the physical cores present in the CPU – making CPU a lot more efficient in performing tasks.
Should You Keep it or Remove It?
Now that you know what VulkanRT is, you might be wondering if you should remove it or keep it. As talked before, VulkanRT comes bundled with softwares, or games, and if it is bundled, then there are two possibilities.
It is either one of the options or it is a requirement for the game, which basically means that there is no point in removing it. However, if you are getting false positive warnings from your anti-virus, you can simply choose to ignore it because there is no harm that can be done through VulkanRT.
Conclusion
OpenGL and DirectX used to rule the API horizons for a long, long time now. However, it was time for a change, and I believe everyone kind of figured that out as well.
The work Khronos Group has done with VulkanRT is a lot more promising as compared to some of the other changes we have seen in the gaming market, and so far it seems that VulkanRT is here to stay.
But the important thing that we must keep in mind is that VulkanRT is still relatively new as compared to what has come before it, and it can be too early for us to comment whether or not Vulkan is going to succeed.
The thing here is that it might not be able to overthrow the DirectX 12 API, but it is surely making waves as far as the performance is concerned.