The mod doesn’t make Tommy Vercetti any prettier, but the lighting around him does.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City may be over 20 years old, but it is still one of the most popular offshoots of the open-world series – which is of course also due to the cool 80s setting and the timeless soundtrack full of classics.
With GTA 6, the return to fictional Florida was announced at the end of 2023. If you don’t want to wait until 2025 and don’t want to miss the cool 80s flair, you can take a look at the upcoming path tracing mod for Vice City.
Vice City as beautiful as never before – new mod makes it possible
So that you don’t have to wait any longer, you can find a two-minute video and screenshots here. The video shows the path tracing mod in daylight and the screenshots of how pretty Vice City will look at night:
Link to Twitter content
This is what the mod changes: What stands out at first glance are the improved lighting effects added by the mod. Shadows and ambient occlusion (AO) effects also appear more precise and realistic.
However, not everything looks better. The game’s assets, such as models and textures, seem to correspond to those of the original version, which is noticeable in some places, such as the low-resolution representation of the grass – and therefore cannot keep up with the pretty lighting effects.
What is interesting, however, is that the screenshots and videos shown are not on the upcoming open beta build of NVIDIA RTX Remix based, a soon-to-be-released modding platform that will make it particularly easy for modders to spice up old games with ray tracing and DLSS.
Instead, the modder apparently relies on the NVIDIA RTX Remix Runtime, which was released last year. This means that the graphical quality of the mod could potentially increase even further once the open beta phase starts and the mod developer makes further adjustments. A release date for the mod is still pending.
