GTA San Andreas and Vice City: Proper Shaders rebuilds their lighting
Proper Shaders swaps San Andreas' renderer for a modern one, with real-time lighting, volumetric clouds and PBR materials. What the October 2026 build adds.
Twenty-two years after release, GTA San Andreas has lighting worthy of a modern game. It's the work of Proper Shaders, a mod by Junior_Djjr of Brazil's MixMods collective, with contributions from Jessica Natalia, the developer behind the native PC recompilation of Vice City Stories. On October 6, 2026, a new build for San Andreas and Vice City was unveiled, currently in alpha.
What Proper Shaders does
This isn't a filter like ENB or ReShade, which sit on top of the image. Proper Shaders replaces how the game draws its world, injecting a deferred rendering pipeline into RenderWare, a 2004 engine that was never designed for it.
With deferred rendering, the game draws the geometry first and calculates lighting in a separate pass, so it can handle hundreds of dynamic lights without performance collapsing. Los Santos' baked lighting becomes real-time per-pixel lighting that reacts to the time of day, the weather and every streetlight, headlight and explosion.
Crucially, it works during normal play: the day-night cycle, interiors, cutscenes and weather changes all still behave. It's configurable too, so you can switch everything on or keep only lightweight tweaks that barely touch performance.
What the October build adds
For San Andreas, the new version brings:
- Lighting and shadows: volumetric light beams, soft four-level dynamic shadows, screen-space global illumination and ambient occlusion.
- Sky and weather: volumetric clouds, height fog, god rays, rain, water caustics and a new water surface.
- Image: HDR, tone mapping, bloom, auto exposure, temporal anti-aliasing, sharpening and depth of field.
- Materials: PBR (roughness, metallic and normal maps), physically based car paint with rain effects, and real-time reflections.
- World: grass that bends as you pass through it, plus longer draw distances thanks to multithreading.
- Optional extras: a VHS look, Chinatown Wars-style outlines and the aurora borealis.
On top of that, more than 11,000 textures already come configured with roughness and shadow values.
And in Vice City
The Vice City version is moving in parallel, with FSR frame generation, water physics with fluid simulation and ocean waves, a new rain system, per-pixel lighting, NVIDIA PCCS shadows, a physically based atmosphere and volumetric contrails behind planes.
When you can try it
The mod is free. Its creators fund it by giving Patreon backers early access to alpha builds, which are released to everyone later. The October build is in alpha, with known bugs, and for now only backers have it; it will go public later. Earlier public versions, for San Andreas as well as GTA III and Vice City, remain available on the MixMods site. GTA House doesn't link to downloads.
Our take
Proper Shaders is probably as close as San Andreas will ever get to a true visual remaster, and it highlights what The Definitive Edition failed to do in 2021. That two people pulled it off on a twenty-plus-year-old engine without changing the heart of the game is the best showcase the Brazilian modding scene could ask for. If Rockstar ever remasters its classics again, this is the bar.
