You landed on this page because the game detected an error to start the game.

This particular issue is caused by the game failing to find a suitable physical graphics device.

This can happen if you try to run the game with a graphics card which is below specs (and doesn't support a necessary Vulkan extension) or with outdated drivers for example. Another common recent situation seems to be issues with somehow broken Vulkan runtime installations on the current system.
To troubleshoot the issue, following is a list of things you could try out to resolve the problem.

Update graphics card drivers

Please verify that you have the latest (or at least the minimum required) drivers installed:
For NVIDIA graphics cards, make sure to upgrade drivers to 385.41 or later.
For AMD graphics cards, upgrade drivers to 17.9.1 or later.
On Windows 8.1 the 17.9.1 drivers are officially not supported by AMD. If you run Windows 8.1 you should use the AMD drivers 17.7.1 instead.
On Windows 8 the 17.7.1 drivers are not supported either. We recommend to upgrade to Windows 8.1 instead (which is free for all Windows 8 installations).
Also try out the latest optional drivers, if the current stable/recommended version doesn't work for you.

Ensure using a supported graphics card

Note that the minimum specs to run the game requires a dedicated graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 780/970 or AMD equivalent.
NVIDIA cards below the "Kepler" architecture (aka: < GeForce 600 series) and AMD cards below the "GCN 1st" architecture (aka: < HD 77xx graphics card) don't (officially) support Vulkan and hence won't be able to run the game at all.
For NVIDIA not all GeForce 600/700 cards support Vulkan.
The lowest NVIDIA 600 series cards with Vulkan support are the GeForce GT 635 and GeForce GT 640M. Also note that the GTX 670M isn't supported either as this card also uses the older Fermi architecture.
On the 700 series the GT 730 is known to us to not support Vulkan either.

The following (below specs) graphics cards are known to us to run into this error:

• NVIDIA GT 540M (with 1 GB dedicated memory)
• NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti (with 1 GB dedicated memory)
• NVIDIA GT 630M (with 2 GB dedicated memory)
• NVIDIA GTX 670M (with 3 GB dedicated memory)
• NVIDIA GT 730 (with 3 GB dedicated memory)
• NVIDIA Quadro 2000 (with 1 GB dedicated memory)

Resolve corrupted/broken Vulkan runtime installations

If the graphics card is above specs and drivers are recent, another cause can be an issue with the Vulkan runtime installation being either corrupted or not working correctly. If this is the case, the Vulkan info file (see below about how to retrieve it) will report the following error: VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED
Another variation can lead to the output just seeming to be cut off as displayed on this screenshot:

In such a case you will only see (a subset of) the available layers being listed but no further output (like the presentable surfaces or groups).

Usually, such an error can be resolved by doing a clean re-installation of the graphics card drivers and ensuring that no Vulkan runtime versions are left behind. This wiki page explains in detail how to perform a clean driver installation.

Known CUDA Toolkit installation issue

We are aware that this problem happens when you install the NVIDIA Cuda Toolkit (confirmed with version 10.1 Update 1). Simply reinstalling the latest graphic card drivers as suggested above should resolve the issue, though.

Request further support

If you still happen to run into this problem, your graphics card is above the minimum specs, you verified that you have installed the latest drivers, and a clean reinstallation of the graphics card drivers didn't help, please send a mail to prioritysupport@egosoft.com (Subject: X4-81 - Exitcode 212) with a screenshot of the popup error you got and your dxdiag and vulkaninfo attached. This wiki entry explains how to create this information.