GTA: San Andreas Gets Gorgeous Free Remaster

The third trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI could drop any day now, but in the meantime fans have been treated to a free remaster of San Andreas.

Available via mods for the PC version of GTA: San Andreas, the Proper Shaders mod adds a load of new features to the game in the form of graphical improvements.

Created by modder Junior_Djjr, who stresses that it’s “not a preset or modpack” but a mod, it aims to present the best that San Andreas has ever looked.

While a lot of mods like this often use Reshade as a baseline, Proper Shaders does everything in-engine.

This includes features like Deferred Rendering and Per-Pixel Lighting, which adds a load of new optimised dynamic lights, far more than what the base game offers.

In addition to that, we’ve also got Volumetric Light Beams, Soft Particles, Sun Rays, and Ambient Occlusion (with support for both SSAO and HBAO). Nvidia’s PCSS shadows are also supported here, with Dynamic 4 cascaded per-pixel shadows available in the mod.

Lighting aside, the mod also has some big improvements to texturing. It adds Stochastic Procedural Texturing and an Animated Wind shader, with shaders that are lit by directional light. HDR simulation with tonemapping is also present.

Finally, Junior_Djjr also mentions that all 11,000+ textures in the game have been tweaked with proper values for roughness, stochastic, and shadows casting, which should make them look a lot better than the vanilla game version.

Junior_Djjr

Proper Shaders For Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Also Has A Load More Planned Or In Progress

Meanwhile, Junior_Djjr has also outlined plans for future updates to the mod. Mapping for roughness, ambient occlusion, normal and metallic surfaces are in progress.

Volumetric clouds and underwater textures are also in the works too, alongside screen space reflections and world rainfall surfaces.

And then there are a few aspects of the mod which aren’t currently in-progress, but are planned for a future update further down the line. This includes some bonus graphical features like lens flare, volumetric height fog, and screen space global illumination.

Improvements to car paint and dirt are also planned, along with temporal anti-aliasing to make edges less jagged, and improvements to wind and vegetation shaders.

If you’d like to check out the mod, unfortunately the latest update is only available via Junior_Djjr’s Patreon page. That means you’ll have to pay them if you want the latest version.

On the other hand, an older edition of the mod is available for free, which you can download from this link here. It doesn’t have all of the available features, but it does have enough to give you a taste of what the full mod is like.

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