Gorgeous New GTA 6 Shots Tease Massive Graphics Quality And Realism Leap

The launch of Grand Theft Auto VI is just twelve days away, and I wouldn't fault you for being tired of hearing about the game if you're not interested in playing it. Still, as hardware and tech site, we have to admit finding the game fascinating for its advanced graphics technology if nothing else. Rockstar Games has just released a stack of 38 never-before-seen screenshots that it's calling "The Launch Gallery", and they look truly outstanding.


Yes, we're reporting on new screenshots for a game that'll be out in two weeks. Some of these screenshots are really phenomenal, though. Take the image above, which shows off the game's incredibly detailed character rendering. Most games look extremely "gamey" if you get this close to a character, but in the small version you could be convinced that was a photograph of a real man.


The details in some of these new images are really unlike any game we've ever seen. The level of graphical fidelity that Rockstar has managed to achieve here is really quite outstanding, and even moreso considering that the firm is doing it on hardware from 2020. Remember, the game isn't scheduled for PC yet, and while these screenshots might be from a PC build, they do have telltale markers of being run on a game console.


Take this shot, for example, which looks outstanding overall, except arguably for the NPC to the left there. She looks much more like an NPC from a current-generation console game, which is to say, quite detailed, yet still not to the same nearly photographic level of fidelity we see from the main characters. The cars sure look awesome, though, and the other NPCs in the scene (which are further from the camera) still look fantastic.


In this shot above, at least in the full-resolution version, you can see telltale ray-tracing noise in a few spots, indicating that these very impressive ray-traced direct lights are being rendered at a considerably lower resolution than the final 4K resolution of the game. I talked about this recently in my ROG XBOX Ally X20 review, where I noted that GTA V Enhanced does the same thing with its reflections when you make use of upscaling. GTA VI will assuredly be making heavy use of upscaling on the PS5 and Xbox Series X.


Perhaps the coolest part of this new Launch Gallery is that it shows off environments and characters we haven't seen before. Diving was a thing in GTA V, so obviously it would return in GTA VI, and indeed, we have some remarkably detailed underwater environments, too, including a picture-perfect lionfish. In real-life Florida, lionfish are an invasive species that threaten local reefs; perhaps there will be a mission to help deal with that.


You can see more clear evidence of the game being constrained by console limitations in this shot of Jason and Lucia robbing a Fleeca bank location, a heist very similar to the first one in GTA (V) Online. The character rendering, even the NPCs, is sublime, but subtle banding in the image and the presence of ray-traced noise are possible to pick up if you look carefully. That's not a knock on the graphics, but rather praise, in a way; it proves that Rockstar has achieved these incredible results on very constrained hardware.


We also get to see some of the local folks from the Grassrivers region. GTA 6 apparently models a significant amount of rural Leonida, and it will be fascinating to see how accurate the portrayal of us good Southern folks actually is. (I'm not expecting much.) If you'd like to peruse all of the screenshots yourself in full detail, head over to the Launch Gallery yourself. The game comes out on the 19th, and pre-loads start on the 10th, so get your pre-order in if you're dying to dive in day one. You'll need some 212GB of space for the pre-load, and no telling how much more once the day-one patch drops.