vkDaedalus

A Vulkan post-processing layer with an in-game overlay: add, tune and reorder ReShade and built-in effects while the game runs, on X11 and Wayland, natively or under Wine and Proton. It also switches lsfg-vk frame generation per game, runs effects on a second GPU and shows what it adds to each frame.

In Steam, set a game's launch options to vkdaedalus-run %command%, start the game and press End.

Effects	Add effects	Frame generation
GPU	Performance	Settings

The screenshots are real frames from the test suite, a game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER with an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT as its second GPU (2026-10-25).

Features

• Overlay (End): see-through over the game, with opaque tiles and cards: the profile, the effects switch and Safe Anti-Cheat; Effects, Frame generation, GPUs, Performance, Shaders, Debug, Keys and Settings. Hold F8 or Preview to see the game with its effects while the overlay stays open and the game still gets no input. It follows the desktop's scale (the Wayland output the game is on, or X11's Xft.dpi, or a size chosen in Settings), turns compact on 4:3, portrait and small displays so its text stays readable, closes with its key or its close button, and draws its own pointer. No action is tied to Esc, so Esc can be bound like any key. Changes apply live; a setting read only when a game starts carries a restart mark.
• Effects: CAS, RCAS, DLS, FXAA, SMAA, Deband and LUT built in, and ReShade FX shaders compiled by the upstream ReShade compiler. Add, remove, reorder by dragging, run several instances (cas, cas.1), tune every parameter type, edit an effect's preprocessor definitions and ReShade's global ones.
• Profiles shared between games: each game, detected from its executable (the .exe under Wine and Proton), runs one, and none keeps the layer out of a program.
• Shader manager: point it at shader packs; it finds their Shaders/ and Textures/ folders and test-compiles every shader.
• Frame generation through lsfg-vk, switched and tuned per game from the overlay, with effects before or after it per game.
• Multi-GPU offload: effects can run on another GPU; the GPUs page also shows every GPU's usage and memory.
• Performance card: frame statistics and what vkDaedalus adds to a frame, an estimate marked with a ~, every formula in LATENCY.md: FPS over the last second, the rest over the last 10 seconds, the display's refresh where the compositor reports it. The Debug card's Frame path tab lists which figures this run measures and which it estimates.
• HUD: FPS and, by choice, frame time, slowest 1% and effects time at the top left while the overlay is closed, in Steam's levels (Settings, Interface); off, it draws nothing.
• Settings say what you changed: a filled dot at a row's end, in Settings and on every effect parameter, marks a value changed from its default, which its tooltip names, and a click sets it back.
• Nine colour schemes, Daaboulex soft by default, each holding text, warnings, errors and success at 4.5:1 on every surface (Settings, Interface, Colours).
• Logs and a report: the log also goes to $XDG_STATE_HOME/vkdaedalus/vkdaedalus.log, kept under 8 MiB, lsfg-vk's beside it, and Export on the Debug card's Log tab writes one report, both logs, the GPUs, the layer order and the profile, to your download folder. The Log tab keeps warnings and errors from the start and the rest from when the card opened.
• Safe Anti-Cheat, on for every game by default: no effect reads depth.
• The game gets no input while the overlay is open: the input hook vkdaedalus-run preloads holds the game's keys, buttons and motion on Wayland and X11, with no grab, so a game holding the pointer is held too; a release whose press reached the game still does, so a held key does not stick. Started without vkdaedalus-run, an X11 game gets a keyboard and pointer grab instead.

Upstream

Project	Fork of DadSchoorse/vkBasalt via Boux/vkBasalt_overlay
License	zlib
Tracked	Not tracked. Both upstreams are dormant; this fork is the continuation

Until October 2026 this was vkBasalt Overlay. It read ENABLE_VKBASALT and the VKBASALT_ variables that upstream vkBasalt reads too, and Proton-CachyOS bundles upstream vkBasalt, so both could run in one game; the new name ends that. It is written largely with AI assistance and tested on real GPUs by nix run .#live (TESTING.md). A heavy shader on a game already at full GPU load can still stall it.

Installation

Add vkDaedalus as a flake input and its overlay:

{
  inputs.vkdaedalus = {
    url = "github:Daaboulex/vkDaedalus";
    inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
  };
}

nixpkgs.overlays = [ inputs.vkdaedalus.overlays.default ];

Install covers the 32-bit build, Arch and CachyOS and other distributions.

Documentation

Page	What it covers
Install	NixOS, Arch and CachyOS, meson
Use vkDaedalus in a game	Steam, profiles, other launchers
Keys	the default keys and how to change them
Configuration	every file vkDaedalus keeps and who writes it
Environment variables	every variable it reads
ReShade shaders	shader packs, what runs, the compiled effects cache
Frame generation	lsfg-vk from the overlay, effects before or after it
Run effects on a second GPU	moving rows to another GPU and its limits
Safe Anti-Cheat	what it turns off and what it cannot do
Limitations	known limits and what applies only at the next start
How it works	the frame, input, layer order, a second GPU, failures
Performance	what a frame costs with vkDaedalus, measured per GPU, and FPS counters under frame generation
Development	building and testing
TESTING.md, LATENCY.md, SHADER-COMPATIBILITY.md	what is tested, every timing formula, every shader pack's result

Credits

• vkBasalt by @DadSchoorse (Georg Lehmann), zlib license
• vkBasalt Overlay by @Boux: the ImGui overlay, effect management and shader manager
• vkDaedalus by @Daaboulex
• ReShade's shader compiler by @crosire
• Dear ImGui by @ocornut
• lsfg-vk by @PancakeTAS