Does Grand Theft Auto 6 deliver the generational leap we were hoping for?
The first Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer has arrived – a little ahead of schedule – and despite its minuscule run-time, it’s an important piece of media. Not only is this our first look at what’s likely to be the biggest game of the generation, it’s also our first indication of how Rockstar has innovated its technology for the latest PlayStation and Xbox hardware. It’s doubly significant bearing in mind that the only GTA game of the PS4 and Xbox One era was an enhanced version of a title originally built for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. In essence, we’re looking at a technological leap that encompasses two console generations – and even with the meagre amount of material we have to look at, it’s already looking highly promising.
First of all, as always with trailers – particularly debut trailers – we have to examine the plausibility of what we’re seeing in a world where even ‘in-engine’ footage can look a generation apart from the final game. Is this actually real-time footage from the game engine itself running on target hardware? Is this level of quality attainable by today’s hardware. The good news is that based on what we’re seeing here, we’re inclined to believe this is representative of the actual game.
First of all, pixel-peeping apart, there’s Rockstar’s track record on this kind of thing. Going back to its accompanying media for Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, what we saw may have benefited from dramatic, cinematic camera angles, but there were enough real-time rendering artefacts to confirm that this was indeed the actual game running at its core. It’s the same with Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar put out an ultra HD trailer and could have run it from PC with all settings dialled up and at full, native 4K resolution. It did not do that.
00:00 Introduction01:53 Is the trailer real-time?07:13 Ray-traced global illumination11:10 Ray-traced reflections17:04 Shadows and hair23:50 Character rendering26:30 Could consoles hit 60fps?30:50 Closing discussion
The presentation on display in the first trailer is clearly running at sub-native resolution, perhaps with a spot of dynamic resolution scaling. Finding countable edges is challenging enough in the latest games and more so in a tightly cut trailer, but the infamous bikini shot suggests a native 1440p resolution, while the shot of the two protagonists bursting through the door towards the end may even be slightly under. Hair rendering is one of the technological highlights of the trailer, yet there are dithering artefacts – easily fixable where the trailer to be pre-rendered or run off a super high-end PC. Just about the only part of the trailer that could be brought into question here concerns the TikTok-style vertical videos, which could be subject to very heavy post-processing that helps give them such a highly authentic look, or they could be pre-rendered.
