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.

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

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

Once you have the binaries, 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.

Before building, you will need:

• GCC >= 9
• X11 development files
• glslang
• spirv-opt

See below on how to install them.

For Arch-based distributions, execute:

sudo pacman -Syu glslang vulkan-tools lib32-libx11 libx11

For newer Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions, execute:

sudo apt install build-essential gcc-multilib libx11-dev libx11-dev:i386 glslang-tools spirv-tools

For Fedora, execute:

sudo dnf install vulkan-tools glslang libX11-devel glibc-devel.i686 libstdc++-devel.i686 spirv-tools libX11-devel.i686

For Gentoo-based distributions, execute:

sudo emerge -v dev-util/glslang dev-util/vulkan-tools dev-util/spirv-tools

To build and install the program, execute:

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

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.

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

ENABLE_VKBASALT=1 yourgame

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.

With Steam, edit your launch options and add:

ENABLE_VKBASALT=1 %command% 

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.

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

The HOME key can be used to disable and re enable the applied effects. This is based on X11 so it won't work on pure wayland. It should however at least not crash without X11.

The amount of debug output can be set with the VKBASALT_LOG_LEVEL env var, e.g. VKBASALT_LOG_LEVEL=debug. Possible values are: trace, debug, info, warn, error, none.

By default the logger outputs to stderr, a file as output location can be set with the VKBASALT_LOG_FILE env var, e.g. VKBASALT_LOG_FILE="vkBasalt.log".

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

Yes.

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

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

Maybe, but not soon.

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.

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.

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.

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

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