Failed to load Vulkan Driver - Unreal Engine 5 (LINUX*ubuntu*)

[Heloriser]

I’ve switched to Ubuntu, because it works better on my aging laptop. I need to run unreal engine for school as I am a game design student, but I keep getting the error above.

I’ve tried looking around, different drivers and performance modes, but nothing has worked so far. Does anyone know how can I fix this?

[brs-sebascova]

Hello there @Heloriser!

Considering Ubuntu’s open source and multiple possible setups, there are different approaches to resolve your issue. Investigating through the community, similar threads have encountered solutions to it. Please test their resolutions for your scenario:

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I am trying to launch Unreal Engine 5 on Ubuntu 22 The message I receive is: Cannot find a compatible Vulkan Device. On my terminal I can run vkcube to see a cube from Vulkan. Is there someway to configure Unreal Engine 5 on launch time to fix this problem?

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Followed the steps to install Unreal Engine on Linux: While launching the UE4Editor, I am receiving the following error: Failed to load the Vulcan Driver which is required to run the engine. The engine no longer fallbacks to OpenGL4 which has been deprecated.

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After some recent commits, UE 5.6 stopped starting on Linux with the following error message: [2025.02.14-15.05.40:828][ 0]Message dialog closed, result: Ok, title: Message, text: Failed to load Vulkan Driver which is required to run the engine. The engine no longer fallbacks to OpenGL4 which has been deprecated. It appears that this issue occurs when the GPU does not support VK_EXT_mesh_shader. Is this expected behavior—that VK_EXT_mesh_shader is required to start UE 5.6—or is it just a bug…

[wfwefwfdfsdf]

Hey I had this exact issue so I’d like to share how I solved this issue

For me it was SecureBoot didn’t allow nvidia driver to be loaded

Temporary solution would be to disable secureboot

For this, you need to enter UEFI configuration screen on boot.

For my machine, I needed to press F10 key while HP startup logo showed, but it depends on computer, so I recommend looking up maintenance manual for your computer online (it’s how I found F10)

After disabling SecureBoot, check if nvidia-smi outputs normally (as opposed to failed to blabla)

If it still fails, then it’s not signing issue so you need other solutions

For me it worked.

But UnrealEditor 5.6.0 still showed that error message. So this was no longer driver issue, it was the Unreal issue. So what I did was I downloaded UnrealEditor 5.5.3 (From the forum posts it seems that 5.6.0 has similar issue and people went back to 5.5.3 to solve their problems)

After that I enabled Secureboot again, but before that, I signed the key of nvidia driver so that SecureBoot will allow NVidia driver to be loaded.

I ran modinfo nvidia which showed that nvidia module was signed by dkms module signing key

I could find the key at /var/lib/dkms/mok.pub

and I ran sudo mokutil --import /var/lib/dkms/mok.pub to register the key, and then enabled the SecureBoot back on, and then everything worked normally.

I also did not install driver via .run file at for example https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/249194/

That’s a last resort option, and more preferably you should follow the instructions at https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html#red-hat-enterprise-linux

I followed the instructions for RHEL but there’s also Ubuntu and most popular Linux distros. Hope this fixes your problem

[JontomXire]

So what I am getting from this reply is that lots and lots of people are having this problem, and the Unreal Engine dev team should fix this problem.

Also, see the post below where the “solution” was to use UE 5.5.3 because UE 5.6 is broken.

[JontomXire]

To summarise all the solutions in the posts linked above:

• Make sure you have Vulkan installed. Yes, someone actually posted when the answer to their problem was in the error description.
• Downgrade to an older version of UE, 5.5.3 works, some people reported 5.5.4 working (not recommended).
• Change “TargetedRHIs” in DefaultEngine.ini from “SF_VULKAN_SM6” to “SF_VULKAN_SM5” (recommended).
• Manually update your graphics card drivers to the latest version, rather than the OS distributed package version.

The last solution is probably best from the point of view of getting the most out of UE, BUT will introduce an extra amount of OS maintenance and, if you are developing a game, will conceivably require everyone who wants to play your game to do the same.

[charstar1]

I’m having the same isssue on Fedora 42. I tried running 5.5.3.
what weirdly got me past the loading was actually creating a project using the First Person Blueprint template. All the other templates I’ve tried would fail. with the ‘Failed to load Vulkan Driver’ error.

Copying the DefaultEngine.ini file over from the First Person template project to another one, fixed it. although I can’t spot anything obvious in that config file.

I’m running an integrated intel Iris Xe (driver 25.1.4).

EDIT: actually, the “SF_VULKAN_SM5" worked but it has to be in the Project’s DefaultEngine.ini instead of DefaultEditor.ini (which was my mistake). the full content is:

[/Script/LinuxTargetPlatform.LinuxTargetSettings]
-TargetedRHIs=SF_VULKAN_SM5
+TargetedRHIs=SF_VULKAN_SM5