vkBasalt

vkBasalt is a Vulkan post processing layer to enhance the visual graphics of games.

Currently, the build in effects are:

• Contrast Adaptive Sharpening
• Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing
• Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing
• Deband/Dithering
• 3D color LookUp Table

It is also possible to use Reshade Fx shaders.

Disclaimer

This is one of my first projects ever, so expect it to have bugs. Use it at your own risk.

Install

There are binaries attached to each release, so manually building from source is not required

Once you have the binearies, either by downloading and unpacking them or by following the build instructions below, execute:

make install

Note: do not run this with sudo. vkBasalt gets installed for the current user only.

Prerequisites

Before building, you will need:

• Vulkan SDK
• glslangValidator - To compile the shader
• GCC >=9

See below on how to install them.

Arch-based distributions

For Arch-based distributions, execute:

pacman -Syu glslang vulkan-headers vulkan-tools vulkan-validation-layers

Fedora

For Fedora, execute:

sudo dnf install vulkan-headers vulkan-tools vulkan-validation-layers vulkan-validation-layers-devel glslang glibc-devel.i686 libstdc++-devel.i686 spirv-tools

Gentoo-based distributions

For Gentoo-based distributions, execute:

sudo emerge -v dev-util/glslang dev-util/vulkan-headers dev-util/vulkan-tools media-libs/vulkan-layers media-libs/vulkan-loader dev-util/spirv-tools

Build

To build and install the program, execute:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/DadSchoorse/vkBasalt.git ~/vkBasalt
cd ~/vkBasalt
make

TIP: Use the -jX (where X=number of cpu threads) option to accelerate the building process.

Usage

Enable the layer with the environment variable (see below). Since vkBasalt 0.2.0 there is one unified variable for 64-bit and 32-bit games.

Standard

When using the terminal or an application (.desktop) file, execute:

ENABLE_VKBASALT=1 yourgame

Lutris

With Lutris, follow these steps below:

1. Right click on a game, and press configure.
2. Go to the System options tab and scroll down to Environment variables.
3. Press on Add, and add ENABLE_VKBASALT under Key, and add 1 under Value.

Steam

With Steam, edit your launch options and add:

ENABLE_VKBASALT=1 %command% 

Configure

Settings like the CAS sharpening strength can be changed in the config file. The config file will be searched for in the following locations:

• a file set with the environment variableVKBASALT_CONFIG_FILE=/path/to/vkBasalt.conf
• vkBasalt.conf in the working directory of the game
• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/vkBasalt/vkBasalt.conf or ~/.config/vkBasalt/vkBasalt.conf if XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set
• $XDG_DATA_HOME/vkBasalt/vkBasalt.conf or ~/.local/share/vkBasalt/vkBasalt.conf if XDG_DATA_HOME is not set
• /usr/share/vkBasalt/vkBasalt.conf
• /usr/local/share/vkBasalt/vkBasalt.conf

If you want to make changes for one game only, you can create a file named vkBasalt.conf in the working directory of the game and change the values there.

Reshade Fx shaders

To run reshade fx shaders e.g. shaders from the reshade repo, you have to set reshadeTexturePath and reshadeIncludePath to the matching dirctories from the repo. To then use a specific shader you need to set a custom effect name to the shader path and then add that effect name to effects like every other effect.

effects = colourfulness:denoise

colourfulness = /home/user/reshade-shaders/Shaders/Colourfulness.fx
denoise = /home/user/reshade-shaders/Shaders/Denoise.fx
reshadeTexturePath = /home/user/reshade-shaders/Textures
reshadeIncludePath = /home/user/reshade-shaders/Shaders

FAQ

Why is it called vkBasalt?

It's a joke: vulkan post processing → after vulcan → basalt

Will vkBasalt get me banned?

Maybe. To my knowledge this hasn't happened yet but don't blame me if your frog dies.

Will there be a openGl version?

No. I don't know anything about openGl and I don't want to either. Also openGl has no layer system like vulkan.

Will there be a GUI in the future?

Maybe, but not soon.

So is vkBasalt just a reshade port for linux?

Not really, most of the code was written from scratch. vkBasalt directly uses reshade source code for the shader compiler (thanks @crosire), but that's about it.

Does every reshade shader work?

No. Shaders that need multiple techniques do not work, there might still be problems with stencil and blending and depth buffer access isn't ready yet.

You said that "depth buffer access isn't ready yet", what does this mean?

There is a wip version that you can enable with depthCapture = on. It will lead to many problems especially on non nvidia hardware. Also the selected depth buffer isn't always the one you would want.

Is there a way to change settings for reshade shaders

There is some support for it #46. One easy way so to simply edit the shader file.

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