This is an opinion piece by Jackie Thomas, IGN’s senior technical editor, who has been writing about PC hardware for over a decade.
Earlier this week, Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 will run at 30fps on all consoles, including the PS5 Pro. And while I wasn’t surprised, I watched some of the clips that came out this week, and I can’t say I’m not excited to play it, even at 30fps.
The one that really caught my attention was the Instagram account onlyindade. It’s a simple clip of a few cars driving slowly down the road, but it looks downright incredible. I’ve been looking at high-end graphics for 20 years, and I even had to do a double take to make sure it wasn’t just real footage. The footage is highly compressed and it’s difficult to make out some details, but even with compression artifacts, you can tell that GTA 6 will be an absolutely stunning game.
Pausing the video and looking at the road, the quality of the textures is incredible. You can distinguish individual bumps in the asphalt, as well as small debris on the side of the road. Looking at the cars themselves, the reflections in the paint of the cars are beautiful and give the impression of real material. The shadows, too, are nice and soft and behave in the same way you would expect real car shadows to behave, moving away from where the sun is.
These clips from onlyindade don’t specify which platform they were captured on, but I’d put my money on the PS5 Pro. In its blog earlier this week, Rockstar said that the PS5 Pro will have PSSR upscaling and ray traced shadows that are exclusive to that console. Looking at the shadows cast by the cars in this clip, as well as the lack of aliasing on the distant buildings – which admittedly could be drowned out by the compression blur – it definitely seems like the PSSR helped a lot.
Onlyindade shared another clip, this time with the camera inside a car and looking out the window as she drives down the street. Just like in the first clip, the textures of the car door are flawless and just look real. Later in the clip, when the person behind the camera is walking down the sidewalk, the camera looks at a blue and pink car that looks straight out of the 50s.
In this part of the scene, it’s not the car that impresses me, but rather the shadows cast by the palm tree above it. Once again, this clip is great 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 are phenomenal and even move perfectly like him.
When watching these clips, it’s important to keep in mind that the PS5 and Xbox Series X run on graphics architectures that are currently 7 years old. It doesn’t help that these graphics chips are paired with similarly old processors. Even with this aging hardware, it seems like Rockstar has been able to create something that’s better than any other game on the market right now.
Maybe it was just my internet connection, but all of the clips shared by this Dade County Instagram account are extremely compressed, and so it’s very possible that some red flags are grayed out. In a huge open world like this, with long draw distances, details of distant objects are usually the first to fall out, especially since the game lacks VRAM budget.
In this first clip, he look at as if the edges of distant objects are going to be sharp, but compression artifacts make those kinds of details wonky, no matter how beautiful they are. There’s a good chance that when I start this game on my PS5 Pro at launch, I’ll be assaulted by jagged edges on distant lamp posts and buildings – and that’s one of my pet peeves. But it doesn’t seem like that’s the case. I just hope I wasn’t fooled by the inline compression.
More than anything, these clips confirm that 60fps was probably out of the question for current-gen consoles. With this level of fidelity, I’m just surprised it works. But the only thought that comes to mind is: “What will it look like if I can run it on an RTX 5090 and a 9800X3D?” » Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for Rockstar to port the game. Hopefully the rumors about the PC port releasing next year are true.
Jackie Thomas is the senior technical editor at IGN and the queen of PC components. She’s been covering gaming hardware for over a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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