According to Mike on discord:
It was using the AMD iGPU instead of the NVIDIA card. turned out splat-transform couldn't initialize the NVIDIA Vulkan ICD in a headless SSH session. no DISPLAY set though i fixed it by borrowing the X auth from an active GUI session on the machine: XAUTHORITY=/home/user/.Xauthority DISPLAY=:1 prefixed to the command, and it detected the NVIDIA card straight away :)
and
Their desktop vulkan ICD requires an active X11/display session to initialize, which breaks in headless SSH environments. AMD and Intel don't have this issue since their Vulkan drivers work fine without a display
According to Mike on discord:
It was using the AMD iGPU instead of the NVIDIA card. turned out splat-transform couldn't initialize the NVIDIA Vulkan ICD in a headless SSH session. no DISPLAY set though i fixed it by borrowing the X auth from an active GUI session on the machine: XAUTHORITY=/home/user/.Xauthority DISPLAY=:1 prefixed to the command, and it detected the NVIDIA card straight away :)and
Their desktop vulkan ICD requires an active X11/display session to initialize, which breaks in headless SSH environments. AMD and Intel don't have this issue since their Vulkan drivers work fine without a display