Vulkan Run Time Libraries: What It Is and How to Remove It

You opened Settings > Apps and spotted “Vulkan Run Time Libraries” sitting there. You don’t remember installing it. Short version: it ships with your graphics driver bundle.

#What Is Vulkan Run Time Libraries?

Vulkan Run Time Libraries is the Windows-side runtime for Vulkan, a low-overhead graphics and compute API used by modern games, GPU benchmarks, and some creative apps. The runtime itself is a small set of .dll files plus a configuration JSON that lets installed games talk to your GPU through the Vulkan loader.

According to the Khronos Group’s Vulkan 1.0 announcement, the specification launched on February 16, 2016 with same-day driver support from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. Every major GPU vendor has shipped Vulkan as part of their Windows driver package since then, which is why you’ll see the entry on virtually any PC with a recent graphics card.

Wikipedia’s Vulkan article confirms that the API now runs on Windows, Linux, Android, macOS through MoltenVK, and the Nintendo Switch. On Windows, the runtime is what makes that cross-platform support work without you having to install anything by hand.

If your program list shows multiple entries like “Vulkan Run Time Libraries 1.1.73” or “Vulkan Run Time Libraries 1.2.x”, that’s normal. Older NVIDIA driver versions left previous runtimes in place during upgrades, which is why a single PC sometimes shows four or five copies. The fone.tips deep-dive on what VulkanRT actually is covers the version sprawl in more detail and explains why older entries are safe to remove first.

#Vulkan vs. DirectX: A Quick Comparison

Most Windows games default to DirectX. Vulkan is the cross-platform alternative, and it usually wins on CPU-bound systems because it spreads draw call work across multiple cores.

Feature	Vulkan	DirectX 12	OpenGL
Platforms	Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, Switch	Windows, Xbox	Windows, Linux, macOS
CPU overhead	Lowest	Low	High
Multi-thread support	Native	Native	Limited
Year released	2016	2015	1992
Maintained by	Khronos Group	Microsoft	Khronos Group

We tested DOOM Eternal on a Windows 11 desktop with an NVIDIA RTX 3060. On Vulkan at 1440p Ultra Nightmare, it ran at a high, steady frame rate. Switching the renderer to OpenGL wasn’t an option here because the game ships Vulkan-only, which is the cleanest demonstration of why uninstalling the runtime can be a bad idea on a gaming PC.

#Why Your GPU Driver Installs Vulkan Automatically

When you install or update a graphics driver from NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel, the installer drops the Vulkan loader and runtime libraries into C:\Windows\System32. From your point of view, you didn’t add anything — the driver did.

NVIDIA’s Vulkan driver page confirms that GeForce drivers ship with Vulkan support enabled by default. AMD’s GPUOpen Vulkan documentation states that all current Radeon graphics cards include Vulkan in the Adrenalin software bundle, and Intel does the same with its Arc and Iris Xe drivers.

The trigger is the GPU driver, not the games.

When the bundle goes wrong, you’ll often see related errors like no AMD graphics driver is installed or NVIDIA Control Panel keeps closing. Reinstalling the driver fixes both the panel issue and any orphaned Vulkan files in one step.

#Is Vulkan Run Time Libraries Safe to Keep?

Short answer: yes. The Vulkan runtime is signed by your GPU vendor, and the file paths come straight from the official driver installer. There’s no plausible way for malware to masquerade as Vulkan unless your driver source itself was compromised.

A few honest caveats:

• Disk space is trivial. The runtime takes about 1 to 3 MB on disk. There’s no storage reason to remove it.
• It doesn’t run in the background. Vulkan is a library, not a service. Open Task Manager and you won’t find a Vulkan process eating CPU.
• Multiple entries are ugly but harmless. If you see five Vulkan Run Time Libraries entries with different version numbers, that’s old NVIDIA installer behavior, not malware. You can safely uninstall the older versions and keep the newest one.

In our testing on a Windows 10 laptop with no dedicated GPU, the Intel Iris Xe driver had still installed Vulkan, and removing the entry made Wolfenstein: Youngblood crash on launch. The fix was reinstalling the Intel driver, which put Vulkan back in five minutes.

If a security tool flags VulkanRT as suspicious, that’s almost always a false positive caused by the runtime’s low-level GPU access rights. The same fone.tips troubleshooting guide for unsecapp.exe covers a similar pattern: legitimate Windows components flagged because they look unusual.

#How to Remove Vulkan If You Need To

You shouldn’t normally have to. But if you’re cleaning up an old GPU driver, switching cards, or running a script that fails when it sees a stale runtime, removal is straightforward.

The cleanest path is the Settings app route on Windows 10 and Windows 11:

1. Press Windows + I to open Settings.
2. Go to Apps > Installed apps (Windows 11) or Apps > Apps & features (Windows 10).
3. Type “Vulkan” into the search box.
4. For each Vulkan Run Time Libraries entry, click the three-dot menu and pick Uninstall.

Microsoft’s Windows app uninstall guide recommends this Settings path because it removes registry entries that the legacy Control Panel sometimes leaves behind.

On older Windows builds, the legacy appwiz.cpl route still works the same way.

After removing the runtime, restart your PC. If you plan to keep playing Vulkan-based games, run a clean GPU driver install (DDU plus a fresh installer from NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel) so the runtime gets re-deployed. Skip that step and games like DOOM Eternal won’t launch.

If your removal attempt also broke driver functionality, you may run into related issues like .NET Runtime Optimization Service high CPU or a thread stuck in device driver blue screen. Both have well-tested fixes that don’t require touching Vulkan again.

#Which PC Games and Apps Use Vulkan

Vulkan adoption has grown well beyond DOOM. As of 2026, the games and tools most likely to lean on the runtime include:

• id Software titles: DOOM (2016), DOOM Eternal, Wolfenstein II, Wolfenstein: Youngblood. DOOM Eternal is Vulkan-only.
• Sony first-party PC ports: Detroit: Become Human and Heavy Rain ship with Vulkan as the only renderer.
• Open-world games: Red Dead Redemption 2 and No Man’s Sky let you pick Vulkan or DirectX in the launcher.
• Multiplayer shooters: Rainbow Six Siege added a Vulkan renderer in 2020 and now treats it as the recommended choice for 8-core and 16-core CPUs.
• Source 2 engine: Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2 support a Vulkan launch flag for Linux and Windows.
• Emulators: yuzu, Ryujinx, RPCS3, and Cemu all default to Vulkan when available because the API maps cleanly to the original console GPUs.

When we tried Red Dead Redemption 2 on a five-year-old Ryzen 5 3600 with a Radeon RX 5700, switching the launcher from DirectX 12 to Vulkan nudged the frame rate up at 1080p Medium. The bigger win was the 1% low frame times, which felt noticeably smoother on the same hardware.

If you tinker with driver tools, it’s worth pairing this article with the fone.tips Driver Talent review, which covers when third-party driver updaters help versus when they break Vulkan installs.

#Bottom Line

Leave Vulkan Run Time Libraries alone unless you’re rebuilding a graphics driver stack on purpose. The runtime is small, signed by your GPU vendor, and required by enough modern games that uninstalling it usually creates more work than it saves. If you do remove it, schedule a clean GPU driver reinstall in the same session so DOOM Eternal, Rainbow Six Siege, and the emulator scene keep launching the next time you boot.

#Frequently Asked Questions