‘I don’t think we see it here’: GTA 6 launch trailer doesn’t use PS5’s new QSSR upscaler

Sony introduced QSSR earlier this month, bringing a version of the PS5 Pro’s popular PSSR upscaler to the PS5’s base hardware.

While the technology is currently only integrated into first-party titles Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei, it will also be made available to third-party developers, with many speculating that its introduction may have been timed specifically to coincide with GTA 6.

(Which Rockstar marketing says will “play better on PS5.”)

However, tech experts at Digital Foundry don’t believe there’s any evidence of its implementation in this week’s launch trailer, which was captured on Sony’s console according to a disclaimer in the video.

Speaking in a 20-minute video, Rich Leadbetter said:

“I don’t think we see it here. If the internal rendering resolution is 1440p, then what does QSSR do? If it’s going to go to 4K, based on the numbers we looked at in quality mode in Marvel’s Wolverine, you need 4ms to go to 4K. And if you have a rendering budget of 33ms, that’s well over 10% of your rendering budget. QSSR. That’s pretty extravagant.

So the question is: if it’s there, how are they going to use it? And what would that look like if your internal resolution was already relatively high and “good enough”. But image quality was one of the things we criticized in the Extended Look, and I’m curious what QSSR could bring to the table and its viability.

This is obviously a pretty complicated analysis on Leadbetter’s part, but he’s basically saying that QSSR may not be the right fit for GTA 6 if the game is already targeting a resolution that adequately scales to 4K displays. (In this case, native 1440p.)

In particular, he notes that the processing cost he observed in Marvel’s Wolverine would eat into GTA 6’s rendering budget quite significantly, and it’s unclear how that would necessarily benefit the game.

Of course, this launch trailer was likely captured from older footage, and it’s entirely possible that things could change for the final product, due out November 19.

But as of now, there is no evidence of QSSR. I’m sure much more will be said and written about GTA 6’s visuals on PS5 hardware once the final product is available.