Experts Digital Foundry dismantled first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. They said that the game should cover the “leap” through two whole generations, because Grand Theft Auto V was originally released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. At the same time, what is shown in the trailer already looks “promising.”
DF tends to assume that the footage shown is actually playable on the game engine. Proof of this are some real-time rendering artifacts. Experts think that everything shown does not work in native resolution and has dynamic scaling. For example, a moment with a girl in a bikini assumes a native resolution of 1440p, and the main characters breaking into a store may have an even lower resolution.
The hair rendering, one of the technical highlights of the trailer, contains anti-aliasing artifacts. These could be easily fixed by first rendering the scene or running it on a high-end PC. The only part of the trailer that could be pre-rendered or heavily post-processed were the TikTok-style videos.
Experts are almost 100% confident that GTA 6 will run at 30 FPS due to the scale and the large number of technologies used. There are many reasons to believe that the game also uses ray tracing with global illumination and reflections. In this case, reflections can also use a “hybrid” solution, but there are too few materials for a final determination. Rockstar was able to achieve “amazing” lighting, as evidenced by the perfect consistency in illumination of objects and characters in any given scene.
However, one scene uses a classic shadow card – the heroes breaking into the store at the end of the trailer. Rockstar can resort to tricks from other games when the full range of ray tracing effects are not used due to console limitations.
In terms of character detail, the virtual world is “highly stylized”. The characters turned out to be expressive due to their bulging eyes and smooth skin. But Rockstar is pushing the boundaries with hair rendering, which highlights physics that even apply to NPCs. Considering the demands of drawing hair on hardware, experts believe that developers use “thread” technologies that are used by Insomniac Games.
Experts believed that the consoles have a reserve for a mode with 40 FPS, although the target frequency in DF was called 30 frames. However, problems may arise with the Xbox Series S, in particular with RAM. According to experts, their solution could help Rockstar optimize for PC in the future.
GTA 6 will be released in 2025 only on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. The trailer has already broken several records, and an enthusiast has recreated it using the original engine. GTA: Vice City.
