So GTA 6 officially slammed into our collective eyeballs last night with a full 26 minutes of pure gameplay (well, that and some cutscenes) and it has made us ever more desperate to get our hands on a proper PC build of the game.
But the hardware team has been poring over the released footage captured on a lowly PlayStation 5 and we've put our heads together to figure out what we think, and what extra bells and whistly things we want to see built into the eventual PC build of the game.
For right now, we have an admittedly beautifully looking game running at a peasant 30 fps frame rate, on a seven year-old Sony console. The top PC hardware of today is far beyond what the aging hardware inside the PS5 is capable of… even if right now the cost of admittance to the world of top PC hardware is inexcusably high. Who knows, maybe by the time GTA 6 is allowed to release on PC the RAMpocalypse will be over? Though that either means GTA 6 won't release on PC until maybe 2031 or the AI bubble pops sending us back into the economic stone age. Cheery thought.
Hard shadows, fluorescent lights, dingey hallways, sunlit expanses… the team at Rockstar are putting the PlayStation 5 to work in GTA 6. Though the first five minutes of extended gameplay make me feel as though I'll be adjusting the brightness on my TV to see what's actually going on.
As for the open world, I can spot some reflections and lighting that look like they're rendered in a pretty traditional way, rather than full RT. Look to the shiny floor in Lucia's apartment and the reflection of the windows, from the TV set, or the light coming through the blinds onto the kitchen countertop—we're not getting RT cranked to the max on PS5. Same goes for the storefronts we see Lucia holding up at gunpoint later in the gameplay trailer. Though the car chases look pretty lush out in the amber sun-lit tones of Vice City.
We're still trying to spot where effects are more faithfully reproduced out in the open world. We think we've maybe whittled it down to RT for reflections, used sparingly for cutscenes. Though it's definitely a challenge to make out with recorded gameplay going through YouTube's servers.
There do appear to be some RT reflections on the van, puddle, and window around the 16:40-16:50 mark. As Dave also pointed out to me, there's also a touch of what appears to be denoising in some places—on the rear of the van at, say, 16:10—but in other places, RT effects appear pretty low-key or non-existent. Like the molotov cocktail just moments before. A selective approach to balance the beauty of cutscenes and the demands of a massive open world? Makes sense, especially on the PS5's hardware.
With more firepower on PC, a few softer shadows wouldn't go amiss.
With more firepower on PC, a few softer shadows wouldn't go amiss. Some indirect lighting, too, as the shadows look hard enough you could cut them with a knife at times. Presuming GTA 6 will follow in the footsteps of Red Dead Redemption 2 with DLSS support, we should get some help bear the brunt of the graphical load when it does launch on PC.
So, moody lighting, massively high contrast, and gorgeous vistas. It's impressive what can be achieved on this seven-year-old console hardware, no doubt about that; but with that in mind, I'm just more pumped for the PC version after watching this. GTA 6 looks like a game that has the potential to look absolutely stunning with more performance under the hood and when it's not curtailed by outgoing console hardware. It's screaming out for a cutting-edge GPU. It can't come to PC soon enough.
It's a confident move from Rockstar to just put up almost half an hour's worth of actual gameplay, and the lighting looks really quite striking… in stills. Every time I pause the trailer, I admire a little bit of the game's artistry, from its graffiti to the hair of its characters, and it makes the rundown nature of the first building really shine. How good that will be to play is a different matter, as the game's approach to realism does make those dark halls a little darker than I'd want, and without sufficient clarity to easily make out what's going on in an instant.
You can spot Rockstar's pretty incredible attention to detail in some reflections, like you can see Jason in the convex mirror at 12:09.
In motion, it looks surprisingly choppy for an official gameplay trailer.
Rockstar's attention to detail can be a double-edged sword though, as things like the fire on the car at 16:04 looking a tad flat or the lack of an accurate viewfinder in the camera at 20:17 make the world feel a little more plastic. These aren't things I would traditionally even care about, but it's Rockstar's approach to its world that makes them feel a little off. Rockstar's history, plus budget, make it the realistic open world maker, so it has become its unique cross to bear.
In fairness, the game looks undeniably good to me. Rockstar has the reputation for engaging, immersive, and realistic worlds for a reason, and the clarity of textures, plus strong lighting, makes GTA 6 look even more immersive and realistic than its predecessor. Whether or not it's as engaging will have to wait until we have it in our hands.
In motion, it looks surprisingly choppy for an official gameplay trailer. There's notable slowdown right after Jason enters the building at the start, and there are plenty of little sections where the flow of the game is just interrupted. But alas, that's the game running on a PlayStation 5, and we PC gamers have the ability to run this game at higher frame rates, especially when we consider the array of upscaling and frame generation. And Rockstar will have some time between the console and PC release to fine-tune the game too. That's the one benefit of us having to wait.
I'll always jump at a chance to add a pretentious word to my writing, so how about this one: chiaroscuro. Or, the contrast created between light and shade. It's interesting to see how often Rockstar plays with the difference between brightly lit streets and dimly lit interiors, or stark shiny highlights set against moody backdrops.
At points, I almost want to adjust the settings of my Mini LED monitor. The apartment raid at 5.25 switches from a grimy, fluorescent-lit hallway into a candle-lit dwelling with plenty of atmosphere, but also creates the sort of black-on-grey, mushy tones that make me squint to see anything that isn't directly lit. This is likely made worse by video compression, but there are plenty of darker moments that I feel would be difficult to read on anything other than a high-end display.
However, some of the brighter scenes are downright stunning. The meeting scene at the rooftop bar is striking, and the lighting of the character models themselves stands out. The soft shadow on Lucia's right arm as she approaches the bar at 9.55, the highlights in the character's hair. I'll be honest, this is downright impressive for a crowded scene in an open world game.
Impressive enough that some of the lesser elements stand out. The fountain on the left shows some pretty flat water effects, with the two jets looking a little out of place. Similarly, the overblown cigar smoke at 11.13 seems to come from a different era, which is all the more apparent when the rest of the scene is so beautifully rendered.
There are plenty of reflections going on here, but I'm not totally blown away by the shiny stuff overall.
Perhaps some of these more incidental effects might be improved in a PC release—and some of the possibly-ray-traced puddles and car reflections seem like they could do with a whack from the PC hardware headroom stick, too. There are plenty of reflections going on here, but I'm not totally blown away by the shiny stuff overall.
It's also fairly apparent that there's a lot of upscaling in use, as evidenced by the odd bit of shimmering and the occasional fuzzy edge. With some proper PC firepower keeping the frame rate up behind the scenes (and thereby less upscaling assistance), it's possible that things will sharpen up further.
A lot of work seems to have gone into the hair rendering, which is shown in many different styles throughout the footage. However, individual hair strands are something that upscalers can traditionally struggle with, and I think there's some clear evidence of that. Particularly around the three minute mark, where a character's dreadlocks are shown lit from behind by fluorescent lights. They bounce and twist with verve, but the fringes look a little blurred and messy, likely due to the upscaling struggling with the finer strands.
I'm picking out small details, though. Little things. Honestly, GTA 6 looks even better in motion than I expected, although I can't help but feel it's going to be very demanding even at lower settings. Prepare thy graphics card? Mine is already quaking in its boots.
My first reaction to the GTA 6 extended gameplay preview is to marvel at the fact Rockstar has achieved this level of open world detail on lowly PS5 hardware (not even PS5 Pro) and my second is to pine for the inevitably grandeur the PC version will deliver when the company deigns to release it.
I think it looks great, obviously the best-looking GTA ever made, and you can see all the visual hallmarks that set Red Dead Redemption 2 out as still one of the most beautifully realised game worlds you will see. But there are obvious places where the PC version is going to really sing.
The first of which is the level of upscaling Rockstar has had to employ to get this gorgeous world rendering even at 30 fps on a PlayStation 5. I would love to know the input resolution this game capture was operating at, because I get the feeling from some of the fizzing edges to the visuals that it is going to be low.
That's going to be the main thing the PC version will bring to the party—firstly more potential graphical horsepower with high-end GPUs, but also more mature upscaling options with DLSS and FSR really hitting their respective strides right now. You look at DLSS running in Ultra Performance mode at 4K and the visual fidelity, and more importantly the stability of the visuals, is pretty stunning, especially when you consider it's taking 921k pixels and turning them into 8.3 million pixels.
You may not like this, but I'm also pretty confident you're going to get some DLSS Neural Rendering.
Love it or hate it, you're going to get some frame generation options for the PC release, too. By the time the game comes out all the GPU vendors will comfortably in their multi frame gen eras, and it's going to massively help on smoothing out the choppy gameplay you can see most especially at the start of the extended preview.
I would also be willing to bet there's going to be some heavy ray tracing, or even fully path traced options coming our way. At the moment, you can see what we suspect to be some use of ray tracing in the PS5 footage, but very sparingly considering everything else the hardware is being expected to render. That will inevitably be dialed up for the PC.
You may not like this, but I'm also pretty confident you're going to get some DLSS Neural Rendering when GTA 6 hits the PC, too. Having the PC version as a real showcase for all of Nvidia's features would be a real boon for the GPU maker AI company, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a ton of its developer relations team swarming all over Rockstar to get its AI filtering baked into the game.
But what about the first-person mode that made its debut in the PC release of GTA 5, will we see that making a comeback for this generation? We haven't seen it showcased in any of the leaks or preview gameplay, so it doesn't look like it's in the console release, but as the spiritual home of the FPS I could see it being another PC feature.
Whatever does or does not make it into the inevitable and inevitably delayed PC version of GTA 6, one thing this preview has done is made me pine ever more for the chance to throw an RTX 5090 at those visuals and see just how good it can look on the best gaming platform.
1. Best CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
2. Best motherboard: MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi
3. Best RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB DDR5-7200
4. Best SSD: WD_Black SN7100
5. Best graphics card: AMD Radeon RX 9070
