Proper Shaders 05-26 (public access) (Patreon)

(old version from May, much has been improved since then)

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/

Note: due to license, Cloudworks (from June version) is already added to this update too!

If you don't know what Proper Shaders is, check the previous post, where I explain it with more details: https://www.patreon.com/posts/154497598/

Update: May version, with all fixes, visual and stability improvements I did for the whole month, and, mainly, deferred rendering with per-pixel lighting and improved shadows (now less buggy). Keep following comments and Discord for more updates for next days.

I'll record a video only for next version (including clouds and water).

This is the first time in the world that anyone has fully implemented deferred rendering in GTA San Andreas, in a complete way. You might think the game's nights are now laggy with all these dynamic lights... You'd be completely wrong.

You'll notice a significant improvement not only in lights, but also in how shadows, ambient color, and sunlight interact with the world, including the use of reflections on all surfaces (basics of PBR), controlled by roughness PBR value (you'll notice some reflections on certain metallic surfaces and windows).

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

Ambient occlusion (SSAO, HBAO)

HDR simulation with tonemapping (ACES or Timoty)

Auto exposure

Bloom

Sun rays

SMAA

Simple dithered sky shader

New horizon fog

Improved z-fighting

Soft particles

Player mipmapping (automatic)

Shaders lit by directional light

Stochastic procedural texturing

Animated wind shader

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

Volumetric clouds

PBR sky shader with sky blend

Roughness mapping

Ambient occlusion mapping

Normal mapping

Metallic mapping

Water surface

Underwater

Decals projector (replacing the vanilla decals system, from CPU to GPU)

Screen space reflections

World rain surface

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 05-26. For beta supporters on 01.06.26 (DD.MM.YY) and 01.07.26 for the public. Possible bug fixes will be updated in the same post (check comments and Discord).

Sharing is prohibited until specific dates.