New GTA V mod adds near-photorealistic effects to the game

Sadly, the recent reports of Rockstar being so far into GTA 6’s development that it was doing motion capture turned out to be a hoax. The next title in the series is certainly at some stage of early development, but it’ll be years before we see the finished product. Thanks to the work of talented modders, however, it’s possible to make GTA V look like a whole new game.

GTA V is still immensely popular - last month, it became the UK’s best-selling game of the year so far. The online element, which continues to make millions for Rockstar and Take-Two, is one reason for this; another is the huge amount of gameplay/graphical mods that are being churned out.

One such mod, NaturalVision, added near photo-realistic graphics to the game and caused quite a stir when it was released last year. Now, the creator has completely overhauled it with improved weather, lighting, colors, and tone mapping. Modder Razed wants NaturalVision Remastered to “blur the line between fantasy and reality.”

Razed said that in order to make GTA V look as close as possible to the Southern California location it’s based on, he viewed 40 hours of video footage, looked at hundreds of photos, and studied Google Maps of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. It took six months and 1200 hours to complete the updated mod, and as you can see in the video above, it looks quite spectacular.

Razed added that using NaturalVision Remastered won’t have much of a performance impact as it doesn’t use generic post-processing injector ReShade. You can download the mod here but it does require VisualV to work properly, which is available here.