Sick of waiting for Grand Theft Auto 6 even though it’s only been nearly a decade since the franchise’s last release? Good news: While modders haven’t yet built a sixth game from scratch, you wouldn’t be able to tell that by looking at this gameplay video.
On Jan. 8, the popular modding channel Digital Dreams shared a YouTube video showcasing a combination of effects that brings all the best parts of GTA 4 and GTA 5 together into a shader preset that boasts next-next gen visual fidelity. That is, it looks like GTA 6. Personally, I’m reminded of the days when 4k TVs first started hitting the market, and we all gawked at how they looked “more real than real life.” In fact, there’s a very real chance this mod looks better than GTA 6 will from a technical standpoint (not necessarily from an artistic or aesthetic one).
Strictly speaking, the mod from Digital Dreams is a combination of mods, but only in the sense that it has other mod dependencies. This is extremely common for mods across all games: For the most part, you need a couple of script extender mods before you can even think about changing the graphics or adding new mechanics into a game.
In this case, the dependent mod is one a humble little number that brings the GTA 4 map into the GTA 5 game and engine. You know, simple stuff. With this mod alone, you can cruise around Liberty City while enjoying visuals, mechanics, and UI from GTA 5. That alone is a pretty awesome achievement, but the fact remains that the fifth game is nearly 10 years old. The graphics may have been impressive then, but they aren’t so awe-inspiring anymore.
Fast forward to 2024, and Digital Dreams has created a 4k re-texture and shader preset that brings “ray tracing” (I’m using quotations because I’m just about certain it isn’t actual ray tracing, but an indistinguishable emulation of the effects of ray tracing that isn’t worth unpacking), dynamic reflections, textures with more detail than Moby-Dick, and downright stunning lighting into the already existing map port mod. The effect doesn’t just look as good as games that were made today—it looks significantly better.
In case you aren’t familiar with the modding scene, this isn’t the first one that’s made an old game look better than games being released today. That may feel outlandish at first, but you should know that this doesn’t actually mean modders are able to make higher fidelity content than developers.
What’s going on here is developers are taking console and consumer budget limitations into account, while modders are not. If a company like Rockstar released a game that required a $2000 RTX 4090 graphics card to play it, there would probably be riots on the streets. When a modder creates a reshade that requires the same tech, nobody really has any reason to complain, as you can simply not download it if your PC can’t handle it. If a Triple-A company abandoned all restraints and pushed the graphics envelope as far as possible, we would probably end up with something out of The Matrix (and nobody would actually be able to run the game).
You can download the reshade preset from Digital Dreams straight from their Ko-fi page, but fair warning: You’ll need to give the creator a seven euro tip first, and you would also need to develop a somewhat decent understanding of modding before you could make use of their work.
