This is an opinion piece by Jackie Thomas, IGN’s Senior Tech Editor who has been writing about PC hardware for more than a decade.
Earlier this week, Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 would be running at 30 fps on all of the consoles, including the PS5 Pro. And while I wasn’t surprised, I’ve been watching some of the clips that have been trickling out this week, and I can’t say I’m not excited to play it, even at 30 fps.
The one that really got my attention is this one from Instagram account onlyindade. It’s a simple clip of some cars slowly driving down the road, but it looks downright incredible. I’ve been staring at high-end graphics for 20 years, and even I had to do a double take to make sure it wasn’t just real-life footage. Now, the footage is highly compressed, and it’s hard to make out some of the details, but even with compression artifacts, you can tell GTA 6 is going to be an absolutely stunning game.
Pausing the video and looking at the road, the texture quality is incredible. You can make out individual bumps in the asphalt, along with little pieces of debris on the side of the road. Then, looking at the cars themselves, the reflections in the cars’ paint are beautiful and make it look like an actual material. The shadows, too, are nice and soft and behave similarly to how you’d expect the actual shadows of the cars to behave, leaning away from where the sun is.
Now, these clips from onlyindade don’t specify which platform they were captured on, but I’d put my money on them being captured on the PS5 Pro. In its blog earlier this week, Rockstar said the PS5 Pro would have PSSR upscaling and ray traced shadows that are exclusive to that console. And, just looking at the shadows cast by the cars in that clip, along with the lack of aliasing on the distant buildings – which admittedly might be drowned out by compression blurriness – it definitely looks like PSSR helped quite a bit.
Onlyindade shared another clip, this time with the camera inside of a car and looking out the window as it moves down the street. Just like in the first clip, the textures on the car door are pristine, and just straight up look real. Then, later on in the clip, when whoever’s behind the camera is walking on the sidewalk, the camera looks at this blue and pink car that looks like it came straight out of the 50s.
But in this part of the scene, it’s not the car that impresses me, but rather the shadows cast from the palm tree above it. Again, this clip is super compressed, but you can make out individual leaves in the shadows. There’s also a character standing next to the car on his phone, and the shadows there look phenomenal and even move flawlessly as he does.
When looking at these clips, it’s important to keep in mind that both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X are running on graphics architectures that are going on seven years old at this point. And it doesn’t help that those graphics chips are paired with CPUs that are just as old. But even with that aging hardware, it sure seems like Rockstar was able to craft something that looks better than any other game on the market right now.
Now, maybe it was just my internet connection, but all of the clips shared by that Dade County Instagram account are extremely compressed, and so it’s very possible that some red flags were just kind of grayed out. In a huge open world like this with long draw distances, the detail on distant objects is usually the first thing to fall, especially as the game runs out of VRAM budget.
In that first clip, it looks like the edges of distant objects are going to be crisp, but the compression artifacts make those kinds of details seem wobbly no matter how good they look. There’s a decent chance that when I boot this game up on my PS5 Pro at launch, I’m going to be assaulted by jagged edges on distant streetlights and buildings – and that is one of my pet peeves. But it doesn’t look like that’s the case. I just hope I haven’t been fooled by online compression.
But more than anything, these clips confirm that 60 fps was probably out of the question for the current-generation consoles, and with this level of fidelity, I’m just surprised it’s running at all. But the one thought that keeps bouncing around in my head is “just how good will this look when I can run it on an RTX 5090 and a 9800X3D?” Now, I just have to sit and wait for Rockstar to port the game. Hopefully the rumors about the PC port coming out next year are true.
