Adding a little extra visual enhancement to games on Linux is getting more interesting, with the help of the Vulkan post-processing layer vkBasalt which has a new build up.

Recently, they put up a new build enabling SMAA support and yesterday another new version was released to expand it even further.

Available in version 0.2.1 is a new "Deband/Dithering" effect and you can now also change SMAA settings in the configuration file. You might also see it having less of a performance impact, as the settings are now "applied at pipeline creation". There's also been some changes to the Shader Directory and Config File, with both having multiple possible locations where they can rest to help with distribution specific packages.

On top of that two little bug fixes also made it in with SMAA now handling sRGB correctly and CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) should look better due to some "typos from the port to glsl" being fixed.

Really nice to see this project continue expanding. Some games really are limited in their set of visual effects, especially older titles so this could eventually be the go-to layer.

Instructions to download and build it can be found on the GitHub page. You can see a comparison from a previous version in our last article on it.