“Failed to load Vulkan driver which is required to run the engine. the engine no longer fallbacks to OpenGL4 which has been deprecated” when I start UE4Editor in the Ubuntu 16.04
I wish I had seen this before. On Ubuntu, you must install Vulkan utils alongside Vulkan drivers:
$ sudo apt -y install vulkan-utils
1 Like
This is an old as hell thread, but it for some reason is the most visible on this issue when searching for this error message. I managed to find a fix. I personally run Debian 12 and started getting shown this message after upgrading from UE 5.5.4 to UE 5.6. I inspected the log files for information and found only this - that my graphics driver apparently doesn’t support Vulkan SM6 (also the vulkan SDK was empty for some reason idk):
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:060][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Display: Found VULKAN_SDK=
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:060][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Display: Registering provided Vulkan validation layers
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:060][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Display: Updated VK_LAYER_PATH=../../../Engine/Binaries/ThirdParty/Vulkan/Linux
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:060][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Display: Updated LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../../../Engine/Binaries/ThirdParty/Vulkan/Linux
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:060][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Display: Installed Vulkan Loader Path: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:060][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Display: Installed Vulkan Loader instance version 1.3.239.
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:060][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Starting Vulkan Profile check for VP_UE_Vulkan_SM6:
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:083][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Warning: None of the 1 devices meet all the criteria!
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:084][ 0]LogVulkanRHI: Vulkan Profile check complete.
[2025.06.18-22.57.55:084][ 0]LogRHI: Display: Opening shared memory
Now, that’s completely incorrect - I own a GeForce RTX 4070 and I know my graphics driver supports Vulkan SM6 because I was using it in UE 5.5.4, leading to this love letter of a forum post I’m making now about my upgrading experience. Nevertheless, it turned out that apparently the latest Nvidia drivers available via the package store aren’t quite latest enough for UE 5.6.
What I did to fix this is not clean. I don’t care, I just wanna make my game. Follow at your own risk.
I fixed this issue by purging my Nvidia drivers i got from the package store and then installing the latest driver version available on the Nvidia homepage.
# Run this command using superuser privileges (you can swap to it by typing su if you're new to this)
apt purge "*nvidia*"
After you’ve selected and downloaded the drivers for your hardware, just follow the instructions to install on the website, you can find them like this:
During install of the drivers, like 4 errors were reported to me. I ignored all of them, then my system restarted and everything worked again. Linux is one hell of an experience sometimes, man.
1 Like
Hey I had this exact issue so I’d like to share how I solved this issue for as another solution
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
Another thing that helped was the Kernel version - Nvidia driver version compatibility table at RHEL9 precompiled
I forgot how I found that table but that gave me the info of which nvidia driver I should be using for my kernel. I believe there must be similar listing for your distros.