We can’t beat around the bush here: GTA 6′s visuals as shown in the recently released trailer look absolutely mindblowing. From the small details such as Jason’s arm hair, lighting, character detail and unholy draw distances. It looks like a generational leap on top of what we got when the PS5 launched. If I didn’t know any better and you told me this was a PS6 tech-demo, I would believe you. Digital Foundry also analysed the trailer with a technical eye in an extensive breakdown, and shared some interesting details.
Resolution and frame-rate
Image quality first, the trailer seems to be running at around 1440p, and then upscaled to 4k, at 30fps. However, the trailer does use ‘letterboxing’, black bars top and bottom. The precise resolution comes in at 2560×1152. Oliver Mackenzie, analyst at Digital Foundry, says the image quality is one of the areas of the trailer that ‘brings you back to earth’. The footage does look upscaled, and using an FSR1 like image reconstruction upscaler. Mackenzie: ‘They are not delivering super crisp native 4K, 120fps with crazy image quality, it looks fine enough but it’s also not really exceptional in any way.’
This may be dissapointing to some: the trailer does run at 30fps, and the Digital Foundry crew does not seem to think there will be a 60fps mode at launch. Alex Battaglia: ‘You can’t get rid of Ray-tracing Global Illumination, it’s inherent to the way the game works.’ Battaglia also argues that including a 60fps mode would require drastically reducing the resolution to the point where it loses it’s visual identity, because the trailer already barely runs above 1080p.
Ray-tracing confirmed
Rockstar already made it’s debut with Ray-tracing in GTA V, but GTA VI really seems to take it to the next level. John Linneman says: ‘There is a lot of direct, indirect and natural lighting’, referring to a proper, difussed ray-traced global illumination system. Mackenzie states: ‘All throughout this trailer, in almost every shot you get a sense of indirect diffused lighting, it looks fantastic, and that’s particulary obvious in the characters.’ Mackenzie does place a caveat, noting that the game uses almost exclusively trailer shots, and that it’s difficult to predict how good the global illumination would be presented during gameplay. Rockstar is not famously known for downgrading it’s visuals in gameplay versus cutscenes, details in cutscenes were usually rendered in real-time and looked identical in real-time gameplay, such as in Red Dead Redemption 2.
Digital Foundry also confirms the game includes ray-traced reflections. the team primarily praises the reflections on transparent objects such as sunglasses, mirrors, and car windscreens. Battaglia: ‘If you were to try this with anything other than ray-tracing it just wouldn’t work’. The team does note that reflections on rougher surfaces it does seem to be blended with the more traditional screen spaced reflections. The water also seems to be a bit noisy and not super ‘pristine’ as Linneman states it.
Characters
One of the details the team at Digital Foundry is most impressed with, is the gigantic leap in character rendering, and more specifically the hair rendering, Linneman points out one particular scene showcases the improved hair tech well: ‘Right as Lucia mounts Jason in the bedroom she wips him around and you see her hair fly up in the air, the way it all moves is extremely impressive and natural.’ The scene suggests the game includes a hair strand system. Linneman also proceeds to glaze about Jason’s arm hair: ‘There was a lot of armhair, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such detailed arm hair’
Battaglia notes the character rendering looks a lot better than Red Dead Redemption 2: ‘Arthur looked really good, but a lot of the other characters looked cartoony and weird. This is a good step beyond that in a lot of ways.’ The team is also impressed by the sweat patterns, noting characters sweat in irregular and natural patterns, looking extremely realistic. Clothing sees a huge upgrade as well, where clothes seem to be animated independetely to some degree, adding to the realism.
Rockstar recently confirmed that the trailer was running entirely in-game on PS5, using a mix of gameplay and cutscenes. To keep up to date with every GTA VI news update, make sure to check back to RockstarINTEL and sign up to our newsletter for a weekly round-up of all things Rockstar Games.
