Consoles Cringe As GTA V Gets Glorious Free PC Upgrades With Exclusive RT Features
Famously, GTA V may have been the most expensive video game of all time in terms of development costs. However, it's also quite possibly one of the most-played video games of all time. Since its release in 2013, it has remained a top seller, and the PC version has stayed at or near the top of the Steam player charts since 2015. That's why this is a big deal despite that we're talking about a game going on twelve years old.
The new update brings along everything that came in the Expanded & Enhanced edition. That includes a giant pile of new vehicles and vehicle mods, new racing events, ambient animals in the online mode for the first time on PC (with related photography challenges), and lots of awesome quality of life improvements including the new Career Progress feature that helps Level 1 Thugs stay on the path to becoming Level 100 Kingpins, as well as a refreshed UI and introductory flow.
This update is also bringing some huge tech improvements to the game. On consoles, we saw increased resolution and frame rate, improved texture quality, enhanced audio with increased sample fidelity and Dolby Atmos support, and a smattering of ray-tracing features with realistically-simulated shadows and reflections.
Hooray for ultrawide support!
All of that is coming to PC now, with even more tech upgrades added on, including ray-traced ambient occlusion and global illumination, support for advanced upscalers like DLSS 3 and FSR 3, DirectStorage support for super-fast load times, and even dedicated support for the wonky aspect ratios that PC gamers love. It sounds like Rockstar might be fixing the bugs that exist in the current game when frame rates exceed 140 FPS, too.
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Obviously, these updates are going to come with a bump in system requirements, as you can see above. Pretty high requirements for a 12 year old game, but frankly, they're pretty modest overall. Of course, if you want to crank up all the shiny, we expect it'll be pretty demanding even for the latest hardware thanks to all that ray-tracing tech. If there's interest, we'll look at producing some benchmarks on the new build when it hits, so let us know in the comments below if you want to see that!
Perhaps the most impressive part about this update is that it isn't replacing the current version of the game. Players will be able to bring over their GTA Online progress, but if you're a dedicated GTA player with an older PC, you don't have to worry—the current version of the game will remain accessible for the foreseeable future, and you'll even get both versions of the game if you buy a fresh copy. This is surprisingly consumer-friendly behavior from Rockstar, which has had a questionable history on that front, so big ups to the developer for making that possible.
Plenty of gamers are looking forward to Grand Theft Auto VI, still apparently slated for release later this year, but there are a lot of players out there who have a ton of time invested into GTA V's Online portion already, and it looks like it might not be as dead as you would expect when GTA VI launches. Rockstar closes out its blog post by promising more future updates for GTA V Online. If you've never tried the game before, or if you played the single-player and dipped like our Senior Editor Paul Lilly, next month's update could be the best time to jump in.
