There’s no argument that Grand Theft Auto is one of the most popular franchises on earth. Simply look at the top ten sales for the past 10 years and GTA 5 has dominated the charts ever since it launched, two full console generations ago. Three years in we have been bereft of a full Rockstar game built from the ground up for the latest generation of console hardware. Today we finally have a glimpse of just what those shiny new consoles we purchased are capable of, and it did not disappoint.
First some basics on what we saw and the platforms that GTA 6 will launch on, come 2025. The trailer is a development work-in-progress build, likely running on the PlayStation 5. But GTA 6 will also ship on Xbox Series X and Series S, as confirmed by Rockstar when the trailer launched. It’s been in development since at least 2018 when Red Dead Redemption 2 launched, but possibly longer. The same Rockstar Advanced Game Engine is running it, although it will likely be a significantly enhanced and evolved version that will be designed around the capabilities of the current generation.
As before, the new GTA will not initially launch on PC, and no date was provided for when that will happen, so we can at least be confident that we are looking at real time PS5/Series X gameplay. The footage was capped at 30fps, but I would almost guarantee this will be a 30fps target for all three current consoles, which is not a bad thing at all and I think the results reflect that this was the correct choice. Regardless, it’s far too soon to worry about performance yet, especially when we have so much beauty on offer, so let’s get into it.
The Future’s So Bright, We Gotta Wear Shades.
Looking at the trailer, the internal base resolution appears to be 2560x1440 and is likely using a reconstruction solution within the engine to produce a 3840x2160 output. From a visual stability and clarity perspective, I have no concerns here and have long held the view that 1440p to 1620p is the perfect balance of pixel quality versus quantity.
But enough on the least interesting aspects of the engine, what about those brand-new features? As mentioned, this is an upgraded version of the Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 5 engine, and the current-generation updates of those games have already given us a taste of what to expect. Ray-traced shadows and reflections appear prominently within the trailer, as we see self-reflections of raucous crowds on those pearlescent paint jobs, and bikini-clad girls in pools (although planar reflections are a possibility here). Car wing mirrors reflect the bodywork and flying flamingos, in a nod to Miami Vice. We can see a high level of material quality and reflectance across wet streets, polished cars, and even carbon fibre weave. This is also a great area to show the level of Fresnel used across surfaces. As the car and the girl’s green dress move in the scene, the level of reflectance changes with the angle of incidence and lighting.
These also appear to mix and/or fall back to standard screen space reflections, and you can see evidence of disocclusion artifacts during some shots, as the object is occluded or offscreen. The balance here is likely that a limited subset of the scene’s geometry is built into a reflectance dataset. This is then traversed via the bounding volume hierarchy as rays are cast into the scene. Meaning we get all included objects within this BVH reflected via a lower level of detail proxy. And then anything else not within this data set is picked up via SSR or old-fashioned cube-maps.
The shadow solution is likely using a similar mixed method of ray-traced objects that is simply stunning. The trailer footage has signs of contact hardening and umbra and penumbra feathering from both the sun and electric light sources. As per the GTA 5 update, these look to mix with cascaded shadow maps (CSM) which allow a long range of lower quality shadows to be mixed with the pixel-precise ray-traced ones. These create that strong CGI look that the trailer has from all objects within the scene, with characters self-shadowing on their arms, faces and interiors. These are bolstered further with a robust ambient occlusion method, which may be a byproduct of the ray-traced shadows and improved Screen Space solution, such as HBAO or even a mixture of the two. The results are quite staggering, with almost no signs of flicker, dithering, or issues in the micro and macro details.
I did note a couple of close-up interiors that had some shadow flicker, but like ambient occlusion, Rockstar could also be using screen space shadows to help ground all small and distant objects within each of the plentiful shots. With such a limited amount of footage to evaluate it is impossible to know all the techniques deployed here, but mixing shadow maps with screen space shadows is a good solution for two main reasons. One, they lessen the cost of the expensive ray-traced ones, which balances performance with quality, and two, they become a great baseline for the Series S, which will almost certainly lose out on all ray tracing effects, but the fallback solution still provides a confident technique that delivers a close high quality.
Content of Character
One big reason GTA 6 looks so solid and impressive in this trailer is the phenomenal lighting quality throughout. From the manmade neons in clubs at night to the bright sunshine of the packed beaches, the light reactions across sand, buildings, palm trees, skin, hair, and water all look accurate and convincing. The extensive use of global illumination has been a key area of the Rockstar engine since GTA 5 and was improved with Red Dead Redemption 2. Here we see the next evolution of that system, which is also enhanced by clever use of post effects such as a faux VHS dither, perspective warping, and the fan-favourite chromatic aberration. What we get is soft diffuse light that bounces off sand mounds and concrete floors mixed with tight and highly specular dresses, car bonnets, and even sunglasses. The long views of the Miami- and Florida-inspired location highlight sub-surface scattering through the deep blue below as a plane flies by. These look close to shots from the excellent Microsoft Flight Simulator, only here you can fly right down and dive in to cool off.
The use of bounce light, be it baked into an image-based solution as per previous games or a more involved ray tracing one, produces impressive results. As we see, from dark occlusion under cars as they drive to high glare and irradiance bounce on shop interiors, the accuracy and consistency of the lighting solution leaves talk of ray tracing a moot point as the material and object reactions look much closer to an offline render than a real-time game.
This is even more prominent in the characters. The opening shot of the lead character Lucia brings many of these techniques together perfectly, as she stands by the frosted glass of the prison door. Soft burnt orange sunlight bleeds in and provides a red edge light to her skin and hair. Emphasizing the sub-surface scattering extends to skin and hair, but also drastically increases hair quality now. We see full spline-based rendering in many of the main characters here, as her hair swings and bobs. We also see this in the curly locks of the parole officer as her hair bobs and inter collides during this brief shot. Later in the trailer we see a variety of hair styles and features, but, purely in the interests of a technical analysis, the long blonde hair of the poolside bikini poser is the most impressive yet, and brings many of these elements discussed into a crystalised view.
With full hair simulation that not only carries full physics of movement but almost faultless character model and self-collision, it genuinely looks as good as a baked simulation. It twirls around with both weight and momentum, the various colours and layers have anisotropic reflectance across the strands, and they self-occlude and cast pixel-accurate shadows on themselves and the girl’s face and shoulders. These then drape and curve around her shoulders and hand as she poses. The dynamic natural quality of this is staggering, and is backed up not only by the motion-captured animation throughout this and the trailer, but also the sheer density and skinning of the character models. In such a close-quarter and very difficult move set on show here, we have perfect skin deformation on the neck, elbows, shoulders, and fingers. In fact, the only noticeable issues here are some clipping of her hair on the bikini top and the lack of reflectance of hair in the sunglasses.
It's Hot in the City
Wrapping up this short and fast look is one of the often-missed aspects of many of these trailers and why they work. The rendering, lighting, shadows, and overall material work is top tier and I think safe to say the best we have seen on the current generation thus far. But what really blurs the line between CGI and real is the exquisite attention to detail and effort in the animation, physics, world density, and streaming quality. From every shot, be it a twerking star atop a car roof, a mud hungry hillbilly rock salute, or a hammer-wielding grandma captured on an emulated phone camera, everything you see in the trailer looks consistent and authentic. The police bodycam footage of the raid, the startled shoppers fleeing from the alligator, or the crotch-grabbing apology – it is all almost faultless and pristine. No obvious animation set blends, no lighting errors or flickering shadows, no glowing textures or flat-looking surfaces. The look and feel of GTA 6 is undoubtedly a tremendous amount of effort from all involved, and I have only scratched the surface on what we have been allowed to see here. The volumetric smoke that samples light and shadows, the staggering draw distance across many of the long shots and general lack of pop-in.
While a handpicked trailer should always flatter to present a game in the best light where possible, this is only the beginning, I feel, of what the team at Rockstar have in store. The water simulation and tessellated mud, the overblown lighting and fuzzy camera shots that could fool you into thinking it was just recorded on a potato for real. The trailer appears to have so many areas teased, and the sheer scale and variety GTA 6 promises to offer means the next trailer could and will likely highlight completely new aspects and visual and gameplay techniques not touched in this stunner. Rockstar always takes its time to deliver the goods, and with this likely being the only GTA game for this generation – probably the next two generations, in fact – this reveal certainly has grabbed the attention of audiences worldwide. GTA is back, baby.
