Proper Shaders 07-26 (alpha access)
If you don't know what Proper Shaders is, check other posts or official MixMods post: https://www.mixmods.com.br/2026/05/sa-proper-shaders/
(other updates/hotfixes for this month are logged on comments, updated on this same post)
I highly recommend to use with newer Proper Fixes version, that improved mesh normals for better lighting: https://www.mixmods.com.br/2026/06/sa-proper-fixes/
Update:
Added PBR sky feature (physically based rendering sky and atmosphere), including lots of stars, PBR horizon fog and sky fade to fade-out distant buildings on far clip.
Added wet ground effect (rain puddles) with ripples and global PBR reflections.
Added rain streaks/lines with refraction distortion.
Rain is now culled not by camera position, but by effect position. This means, the cull zones the game uses for hiding the rain, is now inside internally on shader to seamless cut rain lines and puddles on the game map, so you can see the rain effect outside even if you are bellow a bridge, for example.
Many other fixes and stability improvements were made throughout the month, and I still plan to add a few more small additions and improvements related to the game's atmosphere on next days.
Jéssica Natália also helped a lot with this update, and she released Proper Shaders port for GTA Vice City too, check it out!
Current progress
Full deferred rendering technique (like modern games)
Per-pixel lighting (hundreds of optimized dynamic lights)
Volumetric lights beams
Dynamic 4 cascaded per-pixel shadows (NVIDIA's PCSS)
Soft shadow mask technique with gaussian blur
Volumetric clouds
Water surface
Water caustics
Underwater
Ambient occlusion (SSAO, HBAO)
HDR simulation with tonemapping (ACES or Timoty)
LUT
Auto exposure
Bloom
Sun rays
SMAA
AMD Contrast Adaptive Sharpening
Adaptive Depth Of Field
Simple dithered sky shader
PBR sky shader with sky blend
New horizon fog
Improved z-fighting
Soft particles
Player mipmapping (automatic)
Shaders lit by directional light
Stochastic procedural texturing
Animated wind shader
World rain surface
Support for unlimited TXDPs (TXD parents) files in .ide files, which helps this (shadermaps) and other texture mods (disabled for now).
All 11+ thousand game textures are already configured with proper values for roughness, stochastic and shadows casting.
In progress
Shadermaps (normal map, roughness map etc).
Cel/anime shading.
GPU instancing grass system.
Decals projector (replacing the vanilla decals system, from CPU to GPU)
Screen space reflections
Screen space shadows
Planned
Lens flare
Volumetric height fog
Screen space global illumination
Vehicle rain surface
Parallax occlusion mapping
Specular anisotropic hair
Subsurface scattering
Advanced car paint and dirt
Temporal anti-aliasing
Improve wind/vegetation shader
Terrain splat maps shader
Download version 07-26. For beta supporters on 01.08.26 (DD.MM.YY) and 01.09.26 for the public. Possible bug fixes will be updated in the same post (check comments and Discord).
Sharing is prohibited until specific dates.