GTA V Modder Razed Drops NaturalVision Enhanced Update on Game’s 13th Anniversary, Adding Improved Ray Tracing and Real Moon Phases

Today marks the 13th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto V's original launch, and modder Razed has celebrated it by releasing a trailer for the newly updated graphics mod NaturalVision Enhanced.

According to Razed, the update brings a multitude of visual improvements, such as:

Upgraded raytraced lighting, directional lighting, and shadows — Increased raytraced light bounce, added raytraced sky lighting, improved vehicle paint and lighting, and added contact shadows and SSAO for more depth.

Upgraded water shaders and underwater lighting — Underwater scenes now have greater depth, contact shadows, and new post-processing effects, plus added subsurface scattering, more natural-looking waves, and rain that can now form ripples on ocean water.

Added retroreflective road signs — Headlights now make road signs and lane markings shine realistically at night.

Upgraded sun/moon phase and moon lighting — Added light transmission for sunlight and moonlight on foliage, the moon now includes real phases and casts light rays, and moon lighting on vehicles and surfaces has been improved.

Upgraded emergency vehicle lighting — Siren lights now cast shadows across the environment and reflect properly off specular surfaces.

Upgraded bloom shaders — Smoother bloom that glows on bright surfaces, optimized convolution bloom performance, with a toggle between optimized or full-quality modes.

Upgraded ped lighting — Added subsurface scattering with light transmission and improved rim lighting on characters.

Added parallax occlusion mapping shader — Adds depth to road and ground surfaces.

Upgraded volumetric clouds — Natively implemented via game shaders and now reflect across all surfaces.

Heat haze shader — Visible on roads in Blaine County and buildings in Los Santos, growing stronger during midday peak hours.

Physical street lighting and reworked LOD lights — Physically accurate lighting model with smooth fade, and LOD lights reworked across the entire map.

Added HDR support.

NaturalVision Enhanced, as the name suggests, is only compatible with GTA V Enhanced and can be downloaded for free from Razed's website.

For anyone unfamiliar with the mod's lineage, NaturalVision has been running almost as long as GTA V itself. Razed, who works under his own name Jamal, started out building ReShade presets before moving into editing game files and shaders directly. The first proper release, NaturalVision Remastered, arrived in August 2017 with a fairly specific goal: making Los Santos and Blaine County look closer to the real Southern California they're modeled on.

That meant research rather than guesswork, with hundreds of photographs and hours of footage of Los Angeles and the Salton Sea region studied to get the color, haze, and light right. Razed claimed more than 4,000 hours went into that version alone.

NaturalVision Evolved followed, entering beta in spring 2020 after an initial run exclusive to Razed's Patreon backers, of whom there were over 13,000 at the time. It has been in more or less continuous development since then, and by that point, the project had outgrown one person, with Razed bringing on a small team to help.

Rockstar's GTA V Enhanced finally arrived on PC in March 2025, adding hardware ray tracing and, in doing so, giving the modding scene an entirely new foundation to build on. NaturalVision Enhanced is the result: a version built specifically around those ray tracing features rather than working against the limitations of the original engine. Evolved continues in parallel for players on GTA V Legacy, and Razed has committed to supporting both throughout 2026.

Of course, some people might see an obvious irony in all of this arriving now. NaturalVision Enhanced has spent years closing the gap between a 2013 game and modern rendering, and volumetric clouds are a neat illustration of the trajectory: Razed implemented them in Evolved, brought them to Enhanced with improvements, and they're a confirmed feature of Grand Theft Auto VI. The mod has essentially been chasing a target that Rockstar is about to reset entirely.

With GTA VI arriving on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X, and no PC version announced, PC players are looking at an unknown wait before they can see what Rockstar's own answer looks like on their hardware (although recent PS5 emulator exploits might surprise PC gamers on that count).

In the meantime, this is comfortably the best Los Santos has ever looked. And when the PC version of GTA VI eventually does arrive, it seems a reasonably safe bet that Razed will be among the first people pulling its shaders apart.