vkBasalt

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

Currently, the only effects are:

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

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 >=7

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 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.

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