After the surprise release of GTA 6 Trailer 2 this week, we waxed lyrical about how the upcoming Rockstar epic may end up being unmatched this generation from a tech perspective - and now the experts over at Digital Foundry have dropped their initial take on all of this new GTA 6 goodness.
To kick things off, the team is massively impressed by what Rockstar looks to be delivering here; with GTA 6 pushing new standards in terms of game rendering and overall fidelity. The outlet is particularly impressed with how the developer is handling ray tracing across the board, including for lighting:
"I think the lighting solution they have here is extremely impressive. They were very good with lighting in Red Dead Redemption 2 already I would say, but obviously, they've upped their game here now with real-time ray tracing.
Many of us have argued that real-time time-of-day changes are not actually that suitable for many games - but Grand Theft Auto is one where it's absolutely a must. I think they made the right choice here."
Beyond going over GTA 6's excellent use of ray traced reflections and other rendering techniques, the team also went on to discuss resolution and performance - and what they can gleam from this new trailer in terms of console tech targets. DF judges this to be running somewhere between 1080p and 1440p, and the footage is also capped at 30FPS; something they currently expect for the full game on current-gen consoles as well.
"As soon as you have ray traced global illumination, a massive open world - those things tend not to run well at 60FPS. We're also looking at — in terms of the resolution of these cinematics — a higher res than 1080p but it's not a whole lot higher res than 1080p in some aspects [...] I think everything points to this being a 30FPS game, maybe with a 40FPS mode on some systems."
The whole group largely agrees with this take, although it is speculated that Rockstar could take the game's Xbox Series S targets and use those to throw together a performance mode on the higher-end consoles, even if this scenario still seems unlikely at this stage. The trailer itself has been captured on PS5, and we're yet to get any information on how the game is performing on Xbox Series X and S.
So, there you have it - while Rockstar hasn't announced its tech specs just yet and likely won't until much closer to launch, it's probably best to expect a 30FPS experience on console for now. If the team can pull off anything better than that, it'd be a nice surprise come next May!