Introduction
Sometimes it can occur that graphics card/device driver installations get corrupted or "broken". The causes for this happening is multitude (ranging from an interrupted installation process, to driver corruption). While the situation became much more rare in recent years, occasionally this can still happen.
From a players point of view, this results in errors to start up the game. Depending on the exact issue, different so called 'exitcodes' can be reported. In cases where part of the driver was simply not installed, the result can also be that starting the game just appears as if nothing happened (i.e. launching the game through Steam looks as if this simply doesn't do anything) or also result in a crash at gamestart.
Usually the best attempt to resolve this is to just reinstall (or upgrade to) the latest graphics card/device drivers. Sometimes however, this doesn't fix the problem, even though it all goes down to an issue with the driver installation.
The following steps should provide a walk through of our suggested procedure to do a clean reinstallation of the graphics card drivers.
Bare in mind that there are alternatives to this approach (some of them making use of 3rd-party tools to help with the procedure). While we are sure that several of these alternatives might be easier to do, we cannot provide instructions or support for these.
If you get instructed by the support team to perform a clean reinstallation of your drivers, we therefore suggest you follow the procedure pointed out below first, before trying out alternative ways.
Step-by-step procedure to do a clean driver installation
First thing to determine is the type of graphic devices installed in your system. If you don't know the graphics devices of your machine, please figure this out first, so you know which drivers you need to install in the following steps. If you contacted support and got instructed to follow these steps, the team would have told you which devices are installed on your system and which drivers you should install.
If you are following the steps here without being in touch with the support team, you can figure out the devices in your system by running the dxdiag tool. To run this, just press the Windows start button on the keyboard, enter dxdiag, and select to run the command:
The "DirectX Diagnostic Tool" window should appear and look something like this:
In there, you should see one or more tabs named Display X (where X ranges from 1 to the number of detected display devices). Laptops usually come with two devices nowadays: a dedicated graphics device and an integrated one. Make a note of the devices which will usually be an AMD, NVidia, and or Intel graphics device.
Remove any current driver and Vulkan runtime
After you determined the type of graphics devices you should remove any existing driver and any instance of the Vulkan runtime. Especially in cases where you might have previously installed a different graphics device (for example and AMD graphics card) which later was replaced by a graphics device of a different manufacturer (f.e. NVIDIA), you should make sure that any left over old drivers for the previous graphics device are uninstalled as well.
To remove the drivers, press the Windows start button on the keyboard and enter add remove:
That should bring up the option: "Add or remove programs" click it, to bring up the Windows settings dialog to cleanly remove installed applications/drivers.
First thing is to make sure that you don't have any custom Vulkan runtimes installed. In the saerch box, enter vulkan.
If this brings up any matching entry stating: Vulkan Run Time Libraries X.X.XX.X please uninstall each of these entries starting with the latest version. In the screenshot below you would first uninstall the version 1.0.54.0 and after it was removed uninstall 1.0.51.0.
Next you want to check for the graphics device drivers. For AMD drivers, enter AMD in the search window. If this brings up one or more entries, make sure to uninstall these AMD drivers. The matching entry to do this for AMD is called: AMD Software. Leave the AMD Chipset drivers alone. They are fine to leave installed w/o impacting the graphics card drivers. The same goes for the AMD Radeon Settings. These might get uninstalled by uninstalling the AMD Software entry, which is fine. If they are left behind afterwards, there's no need to explicitly uninstall them.
After having uninstalled the AMD Software (in case it was present on your device), you should restart the machine.
Once done, Windows might install default drivers for the AMD device. Allow this to go through. Afterwards ensure that the AMD Software entry and the Vulkan Run Time Libraries entries are gone from the Apps & features list.
Next you would check for NVIDIA graphics card drivers by enteringNVIDIA in the search box. If this shows up entries named "NVIDIA GeForce" as shown in the following screenshot, you should uninstall the entry called "NVIDIA Geforce Experience X.XX.X.XX" first.
If that application wasn't installed on your system or after you got it removed, uninstall the NVDIIA Graphics Driver XXX.XX. Uninstalling thsi component should also implicitly remove the other components like HD AUdio Driver and PhysX System Software.
After the deinstallation, restart the machine again.
As pointed out above already for the AMD case, Windows might install default drivers now for the NVIDIA graphics device. Just let that process finish up and afterwards verify that the NVIDIA Graphics Driver entry in the Apps & features settings is gone.
If you happen to have an Intel graphics device installed, make sure to uninstall the current drivers for that device as well.