GTA 5 Higher Quality HBAO graphics mod: How to install, features, and more

The GTA 5 Higher Quality HBAO graphics mod is an amazing tool to make the game look much more realistic with enhanced lighting and adjusted shadows. This mod utilizes the graphics card to further increase the ambient occlusion and provide it with much more precision and resolution. While this is demanding on your PC resources, the overall result is exceptional.

Messing around with the HBAO settings manually can be challenging and requires knowledge about how this feature works in general and in the game. To avoid the hassle, you're better off using the GTA 5 Higher Quality HBAO graphics mod that does this automatically for you.

This article will help you install this mod on your PC and go over everything that it offers.

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GTA 5 Higher Quality HBAO graphics mod is very easy to install and use

Shadows look much better after installing this mod (Image via gta5-mods/Warlord)

Before installing the GTA 5 Higher Quality HBAO graphics mod on your PC, you need to install some important applications that make things easier.You first need to download these files:

• OpenIV
• Script Hook V

Once this is done, you need to follow some instructions to download the mod and install it on your PC. Before you start, it is highly recommended to backup the files and store them in a separate location. This is because mods can sometimes corrupt the game files and cause crashes. It is also a good idea to make a separate mod folder to save all your mods for the game. Now, let's begin installing the GTA 5 Higher Quality HBAO graphics mod.

• Go to GTA5-mods and download Higher Quality HBAO.
• Extract the files and save them on your PC.
• Use OpenIV and open the mods folder.
• Next, go to Update and click on the update.rpf folder.
• Open the Update folder inside the Higher Quality HBAO folder that you extracted.
• Search for the settings file and replace it in the mods folder.
• Close OpenIV and launch the game.

As mentioned before, this GTA 5 mod simply makes the ambient occlusion of the game much better. For those unaware, Ambient Occlusion determines how well the scenes and objects on the screen render and interact with the ambient (natural) lighting of the scene.

The renders look much better (Image via gta5-mods/Warlord)

The default AO (Ambient Occlusion) in GTA 5 is not the best and even looks quite odd in some places. However, installing the GTA 5 Higher Quality HBAO graphics mod fixes this issue by tweaking the settings and making them much better. Apart from this, the darker shadows in the game become much more subtle which makes GTA 5 look more realistic. The downside is that this does take a toll on your PC, which now needs to put more effort into rendering the images.

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After reading about the HBAO mod, you can also check out the GTA 5.5 graphics enhancement mod.