DirextX 11 Steam Games on openSUSE Solved

I recently ran into an issue where some Steam games wouldn’t launch and reported the error that the game would not run without DirectX 11. I was befuddled and could not find a solution. I chatted with people, search through forums and didn’t find a solution. I was left with the belief that the hardware was just too old for the newer games and would have to be demoted to the role of “work only”, which was an overall disappointment to the kids and me.

I ran into this problem again when attempting to play the latest Lego Star Wars game on my Fujitsu Lifebook T725. This, being a significantly newer machine, I knew that the Intel integrated GPU could handle the DirectX 11 graphics without a problem. I even verified the information with Intel to ensure that this machine has the capability. Despite the lack of information out there, I was now convinced that there was some piece of software missing on this machine and quite possibly the Dell Latitude E6530.

Dug into package management system and did a search for all the Vulkan packages and noticed that Vulkan Intel wasn’t installed. I was unsure why this package had not been pulled in automatically. I verified this by doing the same search on my EliteBook.

zypper search vulkan

Here is where I noticed the differences in what packages were installed between the two machines.. As a consequence, I decided to install two packages.

sudo zypper install libvulkan_intel libvulkan_intel-32bit

Zypper pulled in several more dependencies and now games can be played on both the Fujitsu and the Dell Latitude E6530 once again. I am not sure what changed or if somehow some bits were removed at some point down the line but now the problem is solved and these older machines can run the newer games again.

Final Thoughts

Many hours of searching for the solution to this problem ended up being a super simple solution. Vulkan is the answer for gaming on openSUSE, let alone other distributions for playing many of these newer games. Although Vulkan packages were installed along with Steam, the needed Intel specific components were available not but installed. I am glad it was a super easy fix to get DirectX 11 Steam games to work on openSUSE.

References

Fujitsu Lifebook T725 with openSUSE
HP EliteBook 840 G7
Vulkan.org
Steam gaming by Valve