When switching to fullscreen game terminates with Quake Error: "Couldn't create swap chain".

[gargelblaster]

When trying to switch to fullscreen mode in the video options menu, the game terminates with a message box "Quake Error" saying "Couldn't create swap chain". The problem first occurred on vkQuake version 1.05.0. On version 1.04.1 everything works fine. Machine specs are as follows:

Dell notebook OS: Windows 7 64-Bit CPU: Intel Core i7 5600U with integrated HD Graphics 5500 Dedicated GPU: Nvidia Geforce 840M with Geforce Driver GRD 457.30 WHQL Standard

vkQuake is running on the Nvidia GPU.

[LethalManBoob]

vid_desktopfullscreen i think is the command that fixes it. fullscreen exclusive isnt even a thing in vulkan for a long time. its in there, but disabled for some stupid reason.

[Novum]

Driver bug.

Since 1.05.0 vkQuake makes use of exclusive fullscreen. As LethalManBoob said workaround is to use vid_desktopfullscreen. Apparently the driver pretends that it supports it and then fails to actually create a swap chain.

[gargelblaster]

As long as I play using the screen's native resolution, a borderless window is fine. However, on complex maps like ad_tears I'd like to use a lower resolution to gain some fps. Currently this is possible only in a window smaller than the screen. I had tried vid_desktopfullscreen already. But it seems to have no effect. Playing in a lower resolution scaled to fullscreen is possible in version 1.04.1.

[Novum]

I'll add some code that tries to create the swap chain again without the full screen exclusivity, but I can't test this. It's really an NVIDIA bug.

[Novum]

82a896687c1161001729bae5ca3ebb458065ec05

[gargelblaster]

Thanks a lot for the effort. I greatly appreciate your work. Will there be a new release or, if not, would it be possible to provide an executable for testing? Unfortunately I don't have a build system in place.

[dorian-apanel-intel]

I guess that this laptop screen is connected to integrated card, so discrete GPU will not enter exclusive mode for sure. Trying to recreate swapchain without exclusive mode is a right approach (vkQuake2 does it too).

[Novum]

The right thing would be that the driver to not advertise that it can do exclusive full screen in the first place if it can't. The extension specifically has a way to query this on the fly.

[dorian-apanel-intel]

@Novum For hardware related stuff I agree. But driver may need to exit exclusive mode at runtime (it depends on OS and other apps), game should be prepared for it.

[Novum]

@dorian-apanel-intel I really don't understand what you are going on about. I call vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceCapabilities2KHR right before I create the swap chain and pass VkSurfaceCapabilitiesFullScreenExclusiveEXT which specifically has a "fullScreenExclusiveSupported" return value exactly for this.

It's still a driver bug.

[dorian-apanel-intel]

@Novum vkCreateSwapchainKHR can fail even if fullScreenExclusiveSupported is true. It is stated in Vulkan spec:

In some cases, swapchain creation may fail if exclusive full-screen mode is requested for application control, but for some implementation-specific reason exclusive full-screen access is unavailable for the particular combination of parameters provided. If this occurs, VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED will be returned.

In some cases this is not a driver bug, so it is better to recreate instead of terminating the game in my opinion.