There's this pretty underground game coming out next year called Grand Theft Auto 6. Not too sure if you've heard of it. A second trailer has just launched for Rockstar's cosy city life/ murderthon, and the thing I'm most impressed by are its beer bottles. Boring, I know.
Just over the two-minute mark into the latest trailer, Lucia and Jason, two of the game's protagonists, arrive at their riverside property and lie down with a couple of beers. Not only do you see the bubbles and the condensation on those glass bottles, but you also see the reflection of the TV and the light pouring in from the outside.
I shouldn't be surprised. Rockstar is known for little details, it is the company that made horse testicles shrink in the cold, after all. But it does suggest a splash of ray tracing is being used here on at least certain effects. There are bottles, frames, puddles, and even controllers reflecting on glass tables littered throughout the trailer that all scream 'look my these reflections', and the shadows look pretty impressive too.
The water in the latest trailer also looks impeccable, flowing naturally in the warm sun. You might ask, 'How do you know the sun is warm?' and I'd respond, 'I can practically feel it through the screen.
Oohing and ahhing at the trailer in the PC Gamer office brought about a conversation about how bottles and the technology around them have always represented a challenge for video game textures.
Water is hard to make look real, lighting is hard to make look real—bottles are a combination of the two. Back in 2020, Half Life: Alyx implemented a rather wonderful shader which accurately reflects how water moves in a bottle, and that same shader was later implemented in Counter-Strike 2. It's a small detail that means a lot in context. This is something both Valve and Rockstar do well.
When not admiring bottles and lighting fragments, the rest of the trailer looks great, too. Textures are nearly movie-like, and the sheen that comes off water, or a dull light bulb above our main characters, makes the game feel grounded and real. I'm not one to normally stare, but even the way sweat pours down the chest of Jason in the hot sun feels so needlessly but impressively Rockstar.
Rockstar seems to always be at the front of graphical limitations with the launch of its big games, and early signs suggest GTA 6 will be no different. It's a looker, and the way that trailer 2 leaves shots of glass, guns, and the smoke of the back of a motorbike to just sit shows how confident Rockstar is in its vision.
I bought a new PC near the latter half of last year, and my RTX 4070 Super has been able to handle pretty much everything I've thrown at it. I have no doubt it will be able to run GTA 6, especially when the current generation of Xbox and PlayStation will both be able to play it at its launch.
However, I can almost sense the strain that Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ultra settings leaves my rig under. Everything gets quite hot, and I can get above 60 fps on 4K, but not much more.
This doesn't seem too bad, but the RTX 4070 Super is a mid-range card that launched five years after Red Redemption 2 did on PC. By the time GTA 6 launches on PC (likely at some point in 2027), we will be either ready for the launch of the RTX 60-series line or already have it in our PCs.
You can actually see some stuttering even in the trailer. Trailers are highly edited and likely watched many times before they go live, so the inclusion certainly seems a bit strange. For instance, at 1:42 into the trailer, there's a scene with a man with a towel over his neck and, as he steps forward, the frame rate slows down.
We still have a year until the game launches on console, so that is time for Rockstar to clean up performance, but it's clear it's going to be a mighty game from a technical standpoint.
This is all before mentioning that Rockstar is known for having much better console ports than PC ones. GTA 6 will likely be aiming for 30 fps on PS5 with some amount of ray tracing included, but we don't know what kind of PC rig is needed for an equivalent experience. GTA 5 had a miserable launch on PC, and even the GTA 5 Enhanced launch in March this year was met by a mixed response.
Assuming there will be a 12-month+ wait for GTA 6 on PC, one can always hope it will be optimised for that RTX 20-series card you've been rocking, but Rockstar's history suggests it may be a bit of a slog to run on older gear. A worthwhile slog, thanks to excellent visuals and an engaging story, but a slog nonetheless.
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