Thursday, May 8th 2025
Rockstar Claims GTA VI Trailer 2 "Captured Entirely" by PlayStation 5 Base Hardware
Not too long after announcing the delay of their flagship next-gen AAA+ game, Rockstar Games appeased the masses with the uploading of a bombastic second trailer—showcasing Grand Theft Auto VI's various colorful cast members, Vice City locales, and spectacular visual effects. Online debaters have picked this cinematic preview apart; many doubters reckon that teaser material (mostly) consists of pre-rendered CGI—pumped out by "pro-grade" equipment. Many observers did not pick up on a small text detail—"captured on PS5"—at the tail end of the studio's GTA VI Trailer 2. To reiterate this point, the Rockstar Games official social media account sent out a bulletin. Yesterday evening's official alert insisted that their: "Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 2 was captured entirely in-game from a PlayStation 5, comprised of equal parts gameplay and cutscenes." This tidbit is also mentioned in the trailer's YouTube description.
Earlier today, the Digital Foundry team published their (must read, or watch) technical critique of Rockstar's forthcoming magnum opus. In their (collective) professional opinion, Rockstar's claim deserves merit: "the trailer was released in 4K at 30 FPS with black bars—producing a rather odd 20:9 aspect ratio—with text at the end of the trailer confirming it was recorded on a base PS5 instead of the more powerful PS5 Pro. Internal resolution counts come out at 1440p, or 2560x1152 to be exact—that's 80 percent of 1440p on the vertical axis. The trailer seems to be using a spatial upscaler, something like AMD's first-generation FSR, with that characteristic curved look present in fine detail like distant text. This means image quality is a little soft, but makes it more believable that the game is actually running on a base PS5, bearing in mind the relatively realistic details and graphical effects elsewhere." Going back to late 2024, another highly anticipated "AAA+" title was unveiled—The Witcher 4; with an Unreal Engine 5 underpinning. At the time, CD Projekt RED hinted about this fantasy blockbuster's introductory trailer being pre-rendered by an "unannounced NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU." We later learned that this mysterious bit of hardware was a formidable GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card. Given GTA VI's (2026) "consoles first" launch, Rockstar engineers do not have the luxury of (immediately) pairing their proprietary RAGE engine with cutting-edge hardware. An elevated visual feast—on PC platforms—is expected further down the line.
The Rockstar Games video description states: "Vice City, USA. Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them. But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida—forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive. This trailer was captured entirely in-game from a PlayStation 5, comprised of equal parts gameplay and cutscenes."
Explore Vice City and beyond at www.rockstargames.com/VI
Sources:
Digital Foundry (Eurogamer), RockstarGames Tweet, Wccftech, Rockstar Intel
Earlier today, the Digital Foundry team published their (must read, or watch) technical critique of Rockstar's forthcoming magnum opus. In their (collective) professional opinion, Rockstar's claim deserves merit: "the trailer was released in 4K at 30 FPS with black bars—producing a rather odd 20:9 aspect ratio—with text at the end of the trailer confirming it was recorded on a base PS5 instead of the more powerful PS5 Pro. Internal resolution counts come out at 1440p, or 2560x1152 to be exact—that's 80 percent of 1440p on the vertical axis. The trailer seems to be using a spatial upscaler, something like AMD's first-generation FSR, with that characteristic curved look present in fine detail like distant text. This means image quality is a little soft, but makes it more believable that the game is actually running on a base PS5, bearing in mind the relatively realistic details and graphical effects elsewhere." Going back to late 2024, another highly anticipated "AAA+" title was unveiled—The Witcher 4; with an Unreal Engine 5 underpinning. At the time, CD Projekt RED hinted about this fantasy blockbuster's introductory trailer being pre-rendered by an "unannounced NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU." We later learned that this mysterious bit of hardware was a formidable GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card. Given GTA VI's (2026) "consoles first" launch, Rockstar engineers do not have the luxury of (immediately) pairing their proprietary RAGE engine with cutting-edge hardware. An elevated visual feast—on PC platforms—is expected further down the line.
Explore Vice City and beyond at www.rockstargames.com/VI
21 Comments on Rockstar Claims GTA VI Trailer 2 "Captured Entirely" by PlayStation 5 Base Hardware
They might oversell you the amount of NPCs or traffic density, though.
Of course they will try to force players to double dip. Of course.
I'd bet Rockstar just has some... rockstar level LOD/texture compression/Memory management mojo thanks to their proprietary engine and the game is likely going to be absolutely bonkers huge to download like 200+ GB of memory space required.
Every individual asset in the scenes scenes looks current gen quality, what always elevates Rockstar is the density and "living" feel of their world. Rockstar will go and put time and effort into making 45 different kinds of distinctly different watches NPCs can wear, and then they'll go into that level of detail with all their assets, and as a result their game world doesn't have the same kinds of repeating patterns that human eye recognizes easily and as a result the "graphics" look better because we're already on the border of photo-realistic imagery with current gen raster graphics when done right.
NASA had lots of money. Doesn't mean it didn't take a lot of time and a lot of prototypes for those best-in-class people to send a rover to Mars.
As for the claims that it was captured entirely on Playstation 5 Non-Pro, I respond with a resounding...
"So what? Bullshots are generated on base hardware too. Doesn't mean your final product will look like after a half-dozen performance passes when the engineers are given their resource budgets."
In other words... ho hum another branch of the Rockstar marketing budget striking again.
They've always been honest in trailers. The best part about these trailers is that this is the worst GTA VI will ever look. For R*, It's equivalent to GTA V on PS3/X360. And people are sitting here and still don't believe it. They're so far ahead of everyone else. It's just goes to show there's imitation and then the real thing, made by real work.
So the "equal parts gameplay and cutscenes" anyway sounds like a carefully crafted sentence. And people probably just had enough of carefully crafted sentences.
AMD should release their new GPUs by that time and my wallet is ready.
As far as quality goes, it's Rockstar, so of course it will be waaaay ahead of its time. This is what unlimited budget and thousands of people working only on one game at a time for 5+ years gives you.
I bet that this'll make 3 cool billion dollars by the time it launches on PC and more than 10 billion by the time they release RDR3.
Even if the base price will be $100, everybody and their dog will buy it and we will have world peace for at least a week when it launches in conslows.
The last two games I bought were Dying Light 2 earlier this year on sale and Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out. So buying gta twice isn't really a big deal for my particular gaming budget, I rarely spend any amount on games just because they've become so mediocre it seems. DL2 was mediocre compared to DL1.