I booted up my ASUS ROG Ally to play some Doom Eternal last night and was confronted with an error message. The message said that the Vulkan initialization had failed. I rebooted and tried again but no dice.

Vulkan is a 3D graphics API similar to Microsoft’s Direct3D and Apple’s Metal APIs. It forms the bridge between the game or app you are using and the GPU in your system. Several mainstream games have adapted it due to lower licensing costs and improved scalability over the older OpenGL.

All of the games installed on my Ally that didn’t use Vulkan worked fine. Those that did, crashed with various errors. My assumption was that some type of software issue was the culprit. I opened up Settings -> Apps -> Installed Apps and sorted by date installed. Sure enough, there was a new piece of software that had installed just a few days ago with Vulkan in the title.

I uninstalled the OpenCL, OpenGL, and Vulkan Compatibility Pack and all my Vulkan games started working normally. I can only guess that something in Microsoft’s Compatibility Pack is not compatible with the Ally’s GPU drivers. I have several gaming systems, but the others have NVidia GPUs. None of them had this particular piece of software installed.