DF’s technical breakdown of the debut trailer.
Is this actually real-time footage from the game engine itself running on target hardware?
Is this level of quality attainable by today’s hardware.
First of all, pixel-peeping apart, there’s Rockstar’s track record on this kind of thing.
It’s the same with Grand Theft Auto 6.
It did not do that.
It adds convincing, natural lighting to the game.
Ray-traced reflections are included, however, and there is some evidence that perhaps it’s a hybrid solution.
Screen-space reflections are a more common tool, which essentially creates reflections by sampling data on-screen.
However, if the data is occluded or not on-screen to begin with, visual artefacts emerge.
There is some small evidence of this in the flamingo scene.
Rockstar Northleaning into ray tracing is good news, but there are limits.
Moving on, another key highlight of the trailer is character rendering.
However, Rockstar is still pushing boundaries here - the hair rendering is absolutely terrific.
The dreadlocks at the 53 second point are also superb.
But here’s the thing: strand-based hair rendering is computationally very expensive.
There’s GPU budget with strand-based solutions for a limited number of characters.
Just one or two is probably best, to be honest.
The generational leap is real and we can’t wait to see more.
