// PC GAMER — GAMING
After seeing what GTA 6 does to a PS5 we're even more desperate to see what the PC version has for us
Looking at the PlayStation 5 capture, we're noodling on just what extra shinies Rockstar might add to the best gaming platform's version.
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So GTA 6 officially slammed into our collective eyeballs last night with a full 26 minutes of pure gameplay (well, that and some cutscenes) and it has made us ever more desperate to get our hands on a proper PC build of the game.
But the hardware team has been poring over the released footage captured on a lowly PlayStation 5 and we've put our heads together to figure out what we think, and what extra bells and whistly things we want to see built into the eventual PC build of the game.
For right now, we have an admittedly beautifully looking game running at a peasant 30 fps frame rate, on a seven year-old Sony console. The top PC hardware of today is far beyond what the aging hardware inside the PS5 is capable of… even if right now the cost of admittance to the world of top PC hardware is inexcusably high. Who knows, maybe by the time GTA 6 is allowed to release on PC the RAMpocalypse will be over? Though that either means GTA 6 won't release on PC until maybe 2031 or the AI bubble pops sending us back into the economic stone age. Cheery thought.
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Hard shadows, fluorescent lights, dingey hallways, sunlit expanses… the team at Rockstar are putting the PlayStation 5 to work in GTA 6. Though the first five minutes of extended gameplay make me feel as though I'll be adjusting the brightness on my TV to see what's actually going on.
As for the open world, I can spot some reflections and lighting that look like they're rendered in a pretty traditional way, rather than full RT. Look to the shiny floor in Lucia's apartment and the reflection of the windows, from the TV set, or the light coming through the blinds onto the kitchen countertop—we're not getting RT cranked to the max on PS5. Same goes for the storefronts we see Lucia holding up at gunpoint later in the gameplay trailer. Though the car chases look pretty lush out in the amber sun-lit tones of Vice City.
We're still trying to spot where effects are more faithfully reproduced out in the open world. We think we've maybe whittled it down to RT for reflections, used sparingly for cutscenes. Though it's definitely a challenge to make out with recorded gameplay going through YouTube's servers.
There do appear to be some RT reflections on the van, puddle, and window around the 16:40-16:50 mark. As Dave also pointed out to me, there's also a touch of what appears to be denoising in some places—on the rear of the van at, say, 16:10—but in other places, RT effects appear pretty low-key or non-existent. Like the molotov cocktail just moments before. A selective approach to balance the beauty of cutscenes and the demands of a massive open world? Makes sense, especially on the PS5's hardware.