For those who love testing out games with Vulkan, do take a look at Forsaken Remastered which was updated last night for Linux to add in Vulkan support. To enable it, simply load the game and go into the video options where it will now let you pick your graphics API.

The person who ported it to Linux, Ryan "Icculus" Gordon, mentioned it on his recent Patreon update although it didn't actually go live for Linux until quite a few hours later.

After finding it not working, I spoke with Icculus for a while last night to discover the cause. Currently, the version of SDL shipped with Ubuntu (Debian's package) doesn't have Vulkan enabled. For some reason on Ubuntu 18.04, Steam wants to use the system installed SDL (instead of the Steam runtime) for Forsaken Remastered which causes Vulkan in the game not to work.

Turns out, there's been an open bug report about it for a while and so last night I poked Canonical about it. Today, it seems people are looking into getting it sorted so that's nice. It does need to be solved, otherwise it's going to cause all sorts of issues for people on Ubuntu.

As a reminder on what's new in the remastered edition (apart from official Linux support), it includes things like: support for Widescreen and 4K monitors, smooth interpolated movement for 144hz displays and beyond, MSAA and SMAA anti aliasing, Ambient Occlusion and Motion Blur effects, enhanced and improved particle effects, a new automap feature, unique levels and enemies featured in the N64 version and plenty more.

If you wish to pick up a copy, you can do so from the Humble Store, GOG and Steam.