Grand Theft Auto 6 Extended Look: The Most Impressive Real-Time Game Graphics Yet?

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:02)
Hello there, and welcome to the DFDX special. Many of you have been waiting for, and certainly the one we've been eagerly looking forward to making. So at the time of taping this, it's the day after the night before, where Rockstar revealed around 26 minutes of gameplay from Grand Theft Auto 6 by some chalk, easily the most eagerly anticipated title of the generation.
I think the bar set by its prior trailers will be difficult to clear, but I think it's fair to say that the technology and artistry on display in that 26 minutes is basically off the charts, the scale of the achievement here singular across this entire generation. But there's a lot to go through across the show and joining me to discuss it, Oliver McKenzie. Hello there.

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:46)
Yes, Rich, it's a big game and also a very big entertainment product, both in terms of anticipation, budget, technology. I think Rockstar is loving the whole package and I'm very excited to talk about it with you here today.

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:58)
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we're going to be covering a range of topics here. We'll be sharing overall impressions on stuff like core rendering, other elements, discussing lighting quality, the phenomenal open world and simulation of display here.
The issues we did see, one of which in particular, we really want Rockstar to be addressed by launch and of course, the big 30 FPS debate, that's not going away and it looks like we finally have some clarity from the developer here. Okay then, Oliver, let's talk about the 26 minutes of Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay. Let's talk about overall brushstrokes first of all, because obviously, our job is to critique gaming technology. It's not perfect, but holy crap, there's nothing like this, is there? This is, as I said earlier, a singular achievement.

**Oliver McKenzie** (1:46)
Yeah, this is a really, really highly, highly effective presentation for what Rockstar wants to do, not just in terms of graphics technology, but also narratively in terms of structure, in terms of everything. I just thought it was fantastic. But yeah, in terms of the visuals here, I mean, it looks absolutely fantastic. I don't really think it comes down to the fidelity of any particular individual system or modeling paradigm or animation paradigm, but more the combination of all those elements with very skilled artists working with relatively mature and comprehensive technology that takes about just about every single visual issue or visual problem that you could solve realistically in current generation consoles in real time and solves it in a satisfactory way.
It just looks so mature and so lived in and so dense and rich in a way that I've never seen from any other shipping full title before.
One particular standout for me was just characters, the hair in particular. We've talked about this in prior shows, but how light diffuses through kinked hair, through that African American kinked hair. That really impressed me because solving that requires tackling a totally different set of problems than for straight hair, and it's a much more complicated lighting problem than for straight hair. The movement of strand hair in particular is just on a completely another level, like the female characters in particular, even when the characters are subjected to extreme violence, they're being put through radical, rapid, violent motions. You get that really strong secondary motion cue from the movement of Lucia's hair that kind of sells the animation for the whole scene, especially when the hair is straight, when her hair is straight because her hair obviously has a number of different hairstyles, and you get that perfect progression of the head movement from the movement of Lucia's head, the base of the hair, the tip of the hair, moving in that delayed fashion, and then the snap back as her head motion stops and the hair waves back and forth. I just think that stuff is perfectly executed, nailed wonderfully here. Obviously, in cutscenes is one thing, that's really impressive in cutscenes, but I'm also seeing evidence of that in gameplay. Her hair looks almost just as good in gameplay, which is quite extraordinary. Skin rendering is also something else that really impressed me. Now, the characters in Gta 6 are not fully realistic. They are semi-stylized. I don't think they're aiming for photorealism, but they have just about perfect skin. I don't mean perfect skin in the model sense, I mean perfect skin in the realistic to human skin rendering sense, because it never has that dull or diffuse look you often see in games. You always get really convincing specular highlights on areas of the face that are elevated, like the cheeks, temple, around the lips, and you always get a sense of how sweaty someone might be, or how much makeup they may be wearing. That's really, really cool. In the drug lab, you can see on all those characters that are in their underwear, you can see that it's sweltering and they're moving around and they're super sweaty and their skin is slick and it just looks perfect, like better than anything else I think I've ever seen in a computer game.