Digital Foundry on the GTA 6 Launch Trailer: Rockstar May Have Fixed RAGE's Oldest Stutter, 1440p on PS5, and an HDR Question Mark
Digital Foundry has picked apart GTA 6's Launch Trailer. The camera stutter that has dogged Rockstar's RAGE engine since GTA 4 is nowhere to be seen, pixel counts land around 1440p on base PS5 with no sign of Sony's new QSSR upscaler, and an HDR expert thinks Rockstar's tone mapping could mean SDR-style HDR. Here is what they found, and what it means for launch.
Rockstar's GTA 6 Launch Trailer came out of nowhere on October 15, and a day later Digital Foundry sat down to take it apart. Their tech breakdown, with Oliver Mackenzie and John Linneman doing most of the analysis, has one genuinely good piece of news: the stutter that has followed Rockstar's RAGE engine games since GTA 4 is nowhere to be seen. It also has numbers for the PS5 version, and one question mark over HDR.
As always with trailers, this is analysis of 90 seconds of captured footage, not the final game. Here is what they found.
The RAGE stutter looks fixed, at least here
Rockstar's games have long had an odd motion problem. The frame rate holds, but the camera's movement isn't consistent from one frame to the next, so slow pans and some character animations look jerky. Mackenzie traces it back at least to GTA 4, through the Red Dead games, and most famously to GTA 5 on PC. Digital Foundry flagged the same issue in August's Extended Look.
In the launch trailer, Mackenzie couldn't find it. He watched it several times, focusing on exactly the shots that exposed it before, such as slow pans, camera travel and orbiting shots, and saw none of the telltale judder. The team noted the trailer is full of left-to-right panning, the kind of shot that usually gives the problem away. They can't say whether Rockstar has fixed it or simply captured the footage in a way that hides it, but if it is fixed, it is the best technical news GTA 6 has had.
Around 1440p on base PS5, and probably no QSSR
Mackenzie's pixel counts put the trailer at about 1440p inside a 4K frame, in line with earlier footage. He thinks the anti-aliasing and upscaling are probably unchanged too, and that the trailer simply avoids the kind of shots, such as a car driving past fences and railings, that would show their weaknesses.
Fans have been asking whether GTA 6 uses Sony's new QSSR upscaler. Digital Foundry is leaning no. If the game already renders at 1440p, QSSR's job would be the final step to 4K, and based on numbers from Wolverine's quality mode the team estimates that costs about 4 milliseconds, well over 10% of the 33-millisecond budget a 30fps game has. They suspect it isn't in this footage. Rob Nelson has already said GTA 6 runs at 30fps on consoles, as we covered in our frame rate explainer.
They also want to see more of the other versions. Everything Rockstar has shown has been captured on PS5, and there have been no PS5 Pro details beyond features like haptics, and no Xbox Series X or Series S footage at all. As for the Plays Best on PlayStation 5 badge on Rockstar's marketing, the team reads it as branding, not a technical claim, and compares it to Nvidia's old The Way It's Meant to Be Played logo.
The haze, and the HDR question
Mackenzie noticed a blown-out, bloomy haze in a lot of daytime and sunset shots that looked different from earlier footage. He likes it, but knows plenty of players don't, and it isn't clear yet whether it is a lighting condition, a choice for this trailer, or how the final game will look.
Linneman raised a bigger question about HDR. He cited HDR specialist Filippo Tarpini, who believes Rockstar is using the AgX tone mapper, based on details like the purple shift around the lights in the pool scene and how reds turn white as they get brighter. AgX has no established HDR implementation, and the footage shows no extra highlight detail, which could mean GTA 6's HDR is SDR converted to HDR rather than true HDR. Linneman points out that Red Dead Redemption 2 launched with weak HDR, and on console nobody can mod a fix in. It is an informed guess from SDR YouTube footage, not a confirmed problem, but it is the thing to check on day one.
The small details they loved
- In the shower scene, Linneman called the water droplets, lit by the sun through the window, unusually good for a game, and the team declared it Digital Foundry's first ever shower scene analysis.
- A character wading through a swamp leaves proper geometric ripples behind them.
- A sniper rifle scope shows a reflection, though they can't tell whether it is ray traced.
- The iguana the car nearly runs over is detailed enough that they jokingly ranked it above Cyberpunk 2077's famous iguana and Crysis 3's tessellated toad.
Linneman was also excited that Justice composed the score, pointing to Rockstar's track record of hiring musicians you wouldn't normally hear in a game, from Tangerine Dream and The Alchemist on GTA 5 to DJ Shadow's mixing work.
The verdict
Mackenzie summed the trailer up as a game that looks "extremely polished," and said he expects GTA 6 to launch in good shape, at least visually. Digital Foundry plans to review it as soon as it can. Until then, the real tests are the ones a trailer can't settle: whether the stutter fix holds in gameplay, how the PS5 Pro and Xbox versions compare, and what HDR looks like on a real screen on November 19.
FAQ
What resolution does GTA 6 run at on PS5?
Rockstar hasn't published it. Digital Foundry's pixel counts put the launch trailer at about 1440p on a base PS5, output in a 4K frame.
Does GTA 6 use PSSR or QSSR?
Digital Foundry saw no sign of Sony's QSSR upscaler in the launch trailer. Rockstar hasn't said which upscaling GTA 6 uses.
Is GTA 6 60fps on PS5?
Rockstar's Rob Nelson has said GTA 6 runs at 30fps on consoles and would not promise a 60fps mode.
Has Rockstar fixed the RAGE engine camera stutter?
It isn't visible in the launch trailer, according to Digital Foundry, but they can't confirm it is fixed in the final game.
