NZXT Developing Some Sort Of New Vulkan-Supported Software For Gamers

While NZXT is known for their computer cases, water cooling systems, and other peripherals for gamers, it appears they are ramping up their gaming software ambitions as well.

NZXT's software efforts got on our radar now that they have requested the "NZXT" author ID tag in the Vulkan XML specification. In their request for the NZXT author ID tag in Vulkan, it raises more eyebrows about their plans: "NZXT is working on software for gamers which will require us to build a vulkan layer. Additional details on this software cannot be made public at this time."

NZXT is known for their hardware gamer-minded peripherals, not currently much in the way of software.

What those Vulkan-powered gaming software plans are remain a mystery for now. NZXT does already offer "NZXT CAM" software as a gaming PC monitoring app that interfaces with their various hardware offerings. That app does include in-game monitoring, for which could be implemented as a Vulkan layer, but not clear if that's their intentions or what their Vulkan software plans include. With NZXT CAM software already being public, presumably they would have mentioned if their Vulkan ID request was just for those purposes as a hardware monitoring Vulkan layer. That also isn't particularly unique with other monitoring software out there already implemented as a Vulkan layer.

We'll see what NZXT ends up doing around Vulkan and gaming software... More than likely they will not be offering any Linux builds but depending upon what it is may be of interest in the context of Steam Play / Proton. NZXT currently doesn't offer any Linux software/drivers but the open-source community has worked on various drivers. User-space software like OpenRGB and KGraken have been popular choices for Linux gamers with NZXT hardware.