What Are Vulkan and DX12?

Vulkan and DX12 (also known as DirectX12) are graphics rendering programs. They communicate between the game and your hardware to help generate the graphics in the most efficient way.

Which should I use?

We recommend using DX12 if you have a high-powered graphics card and PC. Vulkan is often the better choice for less powerful PCs (and PCs that are not DX12 capable) as it offers an optimised experience. We also recommend switching to Vulkan if you experience problems running the game via DX12.

Is Vulkan Faster Than DX12?

Vulkan can be seen to reach higher frame rates in-game, but often it is reported that DX12 will produce a more stable frame rate.

Technical Specifics

Vulkan and DX12 are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The purpose of these interfaces is to help effectively render the environments of the game using your PCs hardware in the most efficient way.

Vulkan is a dedicated graphics API, whereas DX12 has varied APIs that help with other computer tools outside of generating graphics.

As Vulkan is a Lower-overhead API, it requires less system resources on CPU, memory and bandwidth than DX12. This means it can potentially run games better on lower-spec computers, or computers with less powerful CPUs.