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obs-vkcapture

Low-overhead game capture for Vulkan and OpenGL, including under Wayland.

Works on WaylandGPL-2.0-only

Install

Any distro

flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studio.Plugin.OBSVkCapture

Also install org.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.OBSVkCapture so the layer is present inside game runtimes.

Arch (user repository)

paru -S obs-vkcapture

NixOS, or Nix on any distro

nix profile install nixpkgs#obs-studio-plugins.obs-vkcapture

Game capture on Linux is the part that surprises people coming from Windows. There is no equivalent of Windows’ game capture hook, so the usual fallback is capturing the whole screen and cropping — which costs GPU time and captures your notifications along with the game.

obs-vkcapture solves it properly by inserting a Vulkan layer (or an OpenGL shim) into the game process and reading frames straight from the swapchain. The game must be launched with the layer enabled, typically by prefixing the command with obs-gamecapture, or by adding it to the Steam launch options.

The Flatpak case has a wrinkle worth knowing: the plugin goes in the OBS Flatpak, but the layer has to be visible to whatever runtime the game runs in. If you play through Steam, that means the Freedesktop VulkanLayer extension as well.