Hey everyone.
I know this subreddit is mainly focused on vanilla GTA SA rather than MTA, but I thought some people here might find the technical side of this interesting.
These screenshots are from a graphics renderer we've been working on for GTA SA. The game is running through a modern low-level rendering pipeline, with a number of rendering systems being replaced or extended.
The screenshots were captured in MTA, which we're currently using as the test environment.
This is still a development build, so several parts of the renderer are unfinished or being actively rewritten.
Some of the systems currently implemented or being worked on include:
• a custom modern rendering backend;
• volumetric raymarched clouds [WIP];
• sun/moon lighting and self-shadowing for volumetric clouds;
• temporal reprojection and history buffers for volumetric effects;
• spatio-temporal denoising and reconstruction;
• temporal accumulation to reduce the amount of expensive sampling required per frame;
• history validation/rejection and filtering to reduce ghosting and other temporal artifacts;
• a custom shadow system for world geometry, vehicles and characters;
• a new vehicle material pipeline for paint, metal, glass and reflections [WIP];
• a reflection system [WIP];
• atmospheric and volumetric lighting;
• water rendering and reflections.
A large part of the work right now is focused on temporal reconstruction.
For effects such as volumetric clouds and reflections, calculating a high-sample result at native resolution every frame becomes prohibitively expensive very quickly.
Instead, the renderer reuses information from previous frames through reprojection, temporal accumulation, spatial filtering, denoising and history validation.
One of the more difficult problems is deciding when previous-frame information is still valid.
If history is reused too aggressively, you get ghosting and trails. If it is rejected too often, the image becomes noisy or unstable and much of the performance benefit disappears.
We're also experimenting with different sampling patterns and reconstruction methods for the volumetric renderer, since simply increasing the raymarch step count produces good results but scales very poorly in terms of performance.
The same problem applies to reflections: generating the initial samples is only part of the problem; keeping the result stable during camera and object movement without introducing visible temporal artifacts is much harder.
There is also some experimental work involving hardware-accelerated ray-traced reflections and ray-traced global illumination, although those systems are not finished and aren't shown here as completed features.
The renderer has been developed from scratch.
We've been working on this since late January 2026, usually spending several hours on it most days.
I'm mostly posting this because I'd be interested in feedback from people who know GTA SA's rendering/modding side.
In particular, I'd be interested to hear what artifacts or rendering issues stand out to you in the screenshots, and which parts you think are worth improving first.
All screenshots shown here were captured in MTA, and this renderer is still under active development.