Release day 2021.10.14

Published on 2021-10-14

It’s Release Day again!

This release is one of the biggest updates ever, it brings with it the inevitable bugfixes but also many aesthetic improvements with UX care, new juicy implementations and many, very many, performance improvements.

We are always proud to announce updates but we are particularly proud of this and I would like to thank all those who have collaborated directly and indirectly. Thanks!

News

Ok now let’s get to the point. What’s new in this version?

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution

One of the main new features of this release is support for FSR, an Open source technology by AMD that “uses cutting-edge upscaling technologies to help boost your framerates in-game and deliver high-quality, high-resolution gaming experiences, without having to upgrade to a new graphics card”.

This is a very fascinating technology that promises excellent results even on low-level graphics cards. It is currently only supported by some runners, mainly Proton (installable from the Bottles preferences).

FSR support

It support 4 levels of quality and can be easily adjusted to your needs trough the bottle preferences.

DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling)

This is “a cutting-edge AI rendering technology that increases graphics performance by using dedicated AI Tensor Core processors on GeForce RTX ™ GPUs”. DLSS harnesses the power of a deep learning neural network to boost frame rates and generate beautiful, sharp images in games.

DLSS support

It is provided by DXVK-NVAPI, an alternative NVAPI implementation on top of DXVK (the Vulkan-based implementation of DirectX). This technology is only supported by Nvidia RTX GPUs but others can still activate it trough the bottle preferences to take the advantage of Nvidia’s NVAPI implementation.

The DXVK-NVAPI can be keept updated like other components, trough the Bottles preferences.

Sand-boxed homedir

Bottles under Flatpak is fully sandboxed, so you can’t access your home or other files outside the sandbox itself. This mean that also your personal files are not accessible by Bottles, except using portals (like in native file chooser).

Each bottle as a userdir C:\users\ that is symlinked to the real home /home/. Because of the sandbox, programs installed in your bottles, cannot have access to your home, this not only means that you can’t access your personal files, but also that your programs can’t store configurations and other data and this can compromise their normal behavior.

To fix the problem, Bottles now breaks the symlink and actually creates these directories in the sandbox, so the runner can have full acess to these files and your applications can store configurations and data to work properly.

Wait, I know what you’re thinking, and yes. This can be a problem for you, because the sandbox blah blah blah.. the entire process can be reversed read here.

UI/UX Improvements

There are many other news under the hood but for those I refer you to the changelog at the end of the article. Now we want to talk to you about the big news in the graphics part and they are really many and easy to notice.

Bottles 2021.10.14

The thing that immediately catches the eye is certainly the reorganization of the headerbar and the views in the bottle section. Here, in fact, we have reorganized to take care of the user experience, trying to simplify it and make it even more enjoyable.

Bottles 2021.10.14

In modern GTK applications, users expect to find main actions in this location. Even titles such as actions have been moved to the headerbar, making room for the actual contents of the screen and avoiding wasting useful space.

Bottles 2021.10.14

The bottle creation dialog has been revisited, removing superfluous and repetitive text, improving the overall appearance and introducing a nice animation when it comes to revealing the advanced options.

Bottles 2021.10.14

Also the bottle’s details view has been improved. Here the most important thing is the new “FAQ hub”, only for Flatpak users. This is a place where you can find answers to common questions about Bottles under Flatpak.

All other changes

There are a lot of other changes and improvements in this release. Below are other noteworthy ones, for all the others, refer to the GiHub organization.

  • Support for AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution)
  • Support for DLSS with DXVK-NVAPI
  • Show current step during installation using our installer
  • Improved download manager for faster downloads
  • Improved the way we handle the environment on command execution
  • Better .lnk file handler, thanks to Winand and Jared
  • Now the crash reporter show similar reports based on similarity
  • Now under flatpak, the homedir is also sandboxed inside the bottle itself
  • Added easy FAQ menu for beginners (only Flatpak)
  • The download manager is now the operation manager
  • Automatically hide the operation manager if there is no pending task
  • Improved the bottle creation dialog, with less duplicated texts
  • Using transitions in bottle creation dialog
  • Now it is possible to replicate a bottle by importing its bottle.yml as backup
  • Improved the component manager and the way we handle the catalogs
  • Actions are now located in the headerbar
  • Fixed the embedded null byte error
  • Fixed a bug that showed duplicate logs
  • Fixed wrong page order that was causing wrong transitions
  • Fixed a bug that was causing the reports to being sent without title
  • Fixed a bug in bottle deletion that was resulting in a directory not found error
  • Portuguese (Brazil) translations thanks to @davipatricio
  • Esperanto translations thanks to @phlostically
  • Dutch translations thanks to Tim Visee
  • Swedish translations thanks to @bittin
  • Turkish translations thanks to @ersen0
  • Chinese (Simplified) translations thanks to @sr093906
  • Spanish translations thanks to @oscfdezdz
  • Hungarian translations thanks to @ovari

Thanks to all users who contributed to this release!

~ Bottles’ Developers

Download 2021.10.14

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