Proper Shaders 07-26 (public access) (Patreon)

(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.