Rockstar released the Grand Theft Auto 6 launch trailer yesterday, offering a precious 90 seconds of (mostly new) video from the upcoming juggernaut. We’ve now had a chance to analyze the video, and while it’s impossible to say for sure, the footage suggests that a big problem we spotted with the game in previous trailers has been fixed.
In short, previous GTA 6 trailers have all demonstrated animation pacing errors, where camera movements and character animations can appear choppy even when the game’s overall frame rate appears stable. This has been an unfortunate feature of previous RAGE engine titles since Grand Theft Auto 4, so it was no surprise to see it in GTA 6 footage as well.
In the new launch trailer, this characteristic inconsistency is not present, including in slow pans and other shots where it would normally be visible. This is of course only a short trailer and Rockstar could have shot the video in a way that doesn’t reveal the problem so openly, but it could also suggest that this long-standing technological quirk has finally been fixed – assuming the footage here is representative of the game. This is one of two major issues we identified in the Extended Look footage, so seeing it seemingly resolved is exciting.
Elsewhere, the trailer is classic Rockstar, featuring creative camerawork, a huge range of different scenes and effects, and demonstrating mastery of subtle phenomena, like the way water droplets catch sunlight and react against chest hair in the shower scene. It’s fair to say that the entire video is lushly presented, even down to the extremely detailed iguana shown in the opening seconds of the trailer – which seems to have finally surpassed the depiction of herpetofauna in similarly graphics-focused titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Crysis 3.
We also wanted to bring attention to some thoughts on a possible HDR presentation of the game thanks to Filippo Tarpini, an HDR specialist best known for his work at game developer Remedy. Tarpini suspects that Rockstar may be using the AGX tone mapper, which could explain some color changes in images, such as the appearance of a purplish-blue light. There are also hints that Rockstar is using reverse tone mapping to create an HDR presentation from SDR-like hardware, but that’s just an educated guess – we’ll have to wait until we have solid information or see the game for ourselves to render a verdict on the HDR implementation.
One of the biggest questions surrounding the trailer is whether it uses the new QSSR technique that Sony recently revealed, bringing AI-based upscaling from the PS5 Pro to the base PS5. From our perspective, it’s not clear one way or the other, but we would probably lean towards QSSR not being used – as the image quality looked good, but the cinematic shots used here could have been selected to avoid the aliasing and image quality issues that were more prominent in the Extended Look trailer.
Again, the resolution here appears to be 1440p upscaled to 4K (albeit with black bars), and from our testing of QSSR in Wolverine, this type of upscaling appears to have a cost of around 4ms – which would be a large chunk of the 33ms budget to spend on upscaling, when 1440p is already a relatively high resolution. But in reality, we’ve seen so little of QSSR so far, we really need to see more titles to familiarize ourselves with its cost and rendering quality.
Overall, the launch trailer is another good indicator of how perfect the game is at this late stage. What we’d like to see is some sort of statement as to why the game is “the best on PS5” and indeed what buyers should expect on each launch platform, because at the moment we can only speculate on how features, image quality, and performance will vary between the four consoles.
But for now, we’ll leave it there. Stay tuned for more GTA 6 analysis, as more material will (hopefully) be released ahead of the November 19 launch.
Gn tech
