Trying The Vulkan Dota 2 & Talos Principle With Intel's Mesa Driver (July 2016)

With an Intel Broadwell ultrabook I decided to try out the latest Mesa 12.1-dev Git state with the Intel Vulkan driver to see if Dota 2 and Talos Principle are running happy yet on this open-source driver stack.

Last month I tried the Intel Vulkan driver on Skylake with the two games and unfortunately didn't make much progress. With the Core i7 Broadwell powered ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Ubuntu 16.10 with the Padoka PPA (simply change the Yakkety reference to Xenial to get it working there in the apt sources), still with this week's Mesa Git state the games weren't playing correctly with Vulkan -- but were running fine with OpenGL when using the Mesa Git driver.

With Dota 2, the game wouldn't load with the Intel driver stack. That was either when trying to launch the game manually with the Vulkan argument or through the Phoronix Test Suite's Dota 2 test profile and opting for the Vulkan renderer.

When firing up The Talos Principle, I was able to get the Vulkan renderer running... But it wasn't rendering correctly at all, similar to last month's trial with Skylake...

Even with the incorrect rendering, for kicks I decided to try its built-in benchmark mode to see what the numbers would say. OpenGL with the same low quality settings saw a frame-rate of 55.3 while using the Vulkan back-end with the broken rendering saw a frame-rate of 50.3 FPS.

The system specs for reference.

Have any of you got the Intel Vulkan Linux driver working with Dota 2 or The Talos Principle? Share your Vulkan Linux experiences with us in the forums.