Often nvidia users will try to debug it, and discover 'the vulkan checkbox is off but I have the latest driver version!' in gpuZ[0][1] - but it happens across all IHVs, AMD, Intel, etc. I was told by someone in the industry the default Microsoft drivers across all IHVs indeed have DirectX, but not Vulkan.
To make matters more annoying, Windows Update often _overwrites_ the user's driver which they installed from the manufacturer directly, leading to Vulkan becoming broken overnight[2][3]
Easy to find multiple instances of this happening[4][5][6], I became aware of it because of someone asking on /r/vulkan a few weeks ago.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/qj3Rn9p.png https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/rog-strix-series/nvidia-driver...
[1] https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/228597-vu...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/1145ffp/windows_update...
[3] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
[4] https://i.imgur.com/PXZRxYh.png
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/qhfesc/vulkan...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/110bytq/vulkan...
The Vulkan implementation is still there. You just have to install the redistributable. (see https://vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home - Runtime)
There's no separate Vulkan-less version of the drivers AFAIK - it's just that the installation program of the manufacturer doesn't run so that there's no opportunity to install the Vulkan runtime.
My original point remains: out of the box, many Windows users find they have the 'latest drivers' for their graphics card, find that DirectX 12 is working fine on their system, while simultaneously finding Vulkan does not.
For games, it's fine to require users to fix their Vulkan drivers. But if you're making a video player and want to leverage hardware decoding.. I think this is an aspect you should be concerned about and aware of.
not a thing. at worst you get a situation where the ICD loader isn't installed