Proper Shaders 07-26 (public access)
(old version from July, much has been improved since then)
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.
Comments (31)
hi! i noticed this release still had a bug where the graffiti tags would appear with the grove st tag on them by default and the graffiti transparency and fade in didnt work. i tried fixing it with ai and it managed to do it on the 2nd try. it made an asi script, here are the files, works with modloader: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a75RGwOTrY8dgQ9hSSd-LJRve9dLKNCg/view?usp=sharing i hope this is helpful - for anyone. i really like all your mods, ideas and barrier breaking implementations, keep up the good work!!
Isn't here. I don't remember which version I fixed, but I remember was being a while I fixed this (was something to do with SkyGfx).
08-26? ♥
In _ESSENTIALS pack,the windowed mode causes a crash when i try to switch between full-screen and windowed mode using alt+enter .However ,when i remove this proper shader mod,the switching works normally,please fix this bug.Also, on a side note,sometimes tabbing out to do other things in the background causes a null pointer exception in rendering and leads to a crash.
It is warned on readme file.
This is the best mod to date proper shaders is the 1!!! but ive noticed a few vegetation models are white polys i was thinking missing texture or something but i installed ddifferent veg mods and i either got start crashes or lots of other models going blank poly any thoughts on this ?
https://www.mixmods.com.br/2015/07/tutorial-dicas-tudo-sobre-modloader-gta/#Priority
Love the mod though hope it’ll be optimised more cause its laggy when using proper fixes and 2dfx, something with increasing the draw distance makes it lag, keep it up.
yep, it's not even P2dfx, it's PF making it drop FPS tremendously. Try removing just PF and you'll see the huge difference in performances.
The pictures on the wall at The Lil' Probe Inn (when using Rosa HD Textures) are pitch black. Also, the shooting star cant be seen anymore (when enabling the PBR Sky I think...)
Hello , i have alpha tier . When can we expect a new update ? Thanks very much for your work.
First day of the month.
Runtime kernel error and crash after every 5-10 minutes of gameplay. Some of rocks are transparent. anisotropic filtration won't work.
Find what is causing this on your game and tell here.
Amazing work. Will you continue optimizing the mod? I've noticed a 10 fps drop compared to previous versions.
But the new version basically only added rain effects.
how work wis Terrain splat maps shader? im working on terrain with vertex alpha
There is no such thing, at least not yet.
i have this issue where when i launch the game i keep getting bad image error with july shaders update june one works just fine :O just thouth of letting ya know
What you mean bad image error?
Is it normal that the screen goes black every time I minimize the game?
Use Windowed Mode mod to fix game window issues by now.
Is it normal for the game to look a bit dark like this? I'm using the "Very High" version at 5. https://imgur.com/a/3Ca9f7v
Did you mean to say you have no shadows? Well, for a mod whose main purpose is to add shadows to the game, not having shadows, I don't think that's normal.
Man, this is amazing. Clouds are very improved with the timecyc of SkyGFX Ps2.
should you use skygfx together with this mod? I thought that's not working
Everything is good but bro try to fix rain drop when you exit the house and doherty garage very brightness light on missions im nearly finish the walkthrough full proper shader checking without video https://imgur.com/a/sKjAogs
you need proper fixes
Excellent! It'd be geat if you can add Motion Blur like if this were enb series and DoF. Great job Junior!! I'll be waiting Proper Shaders 08-26 ♥ Also any mod that increase crowd in GTA like GTA V crowd.♥
Is it possible to add the ability to create light that will be identical to the way the headlights of a car shine? I would like to modify my siren plugin and create per-pixel light from the siren lights. When creating a spotlight, only a shader is created without per-pixel lighting, as is done with car headlights. https://i.imgur.com/YBF2jOh.png
Yes I'll add it soon, with a few other APIs too.