I've just finished watching GTA 6 trailer two for the 50th time, and I still can't comprehend just how incredible Rockstar's latest entry in this iconic franchise is looking. However, it's also got me worried that my gaming PC is going to need a few upgrades, despite my previous confidence that there would be no need to worry.
It's been over 18 months since I defiantly stated that the best graphics card I can afford, just to be safe.
Trailer two for GTA 6 is visually phenomenal. I'm not just talking about the fidelity of the character models or the vibrant, bustling world of Vice City, but the sheer quality of the lighting alone is almost intimidating when you think about the hardware it might require. The way rays of light so naturally bounce off skin or reflective surfaces is seriously impressive, and hopefully a fair representation of how the final product will look.
However, this super-realistic ray tracing action has also made me reconsider my previous stance on the PC version of GTA 6, and consider that it could become one of the most demanding PC games in recent memory.
We've seen games push their system requirements to incredibly high levels before, namely the pre-optimized Indiana Jones and the Great Circle system requirements.
If trailer two is anything to go by, there's every chance that the PC requirements for GTA 6 will start with a GPU such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 at the bare minimum and scale up to the RTX 4090, or even an RTX 5000 series card – you may even need to enable multi frame gen to get smooth frame rates when it's all maxed out. The flipside to this argument is that we're still yet to see gameplay, and we have no further context for the hardware used to run everything that has been shown so far.
When GTA 5 first released on PC back in 2015, however, the system requirements were on par with what was expected at the time. We still don't know when the PC version of GTA 6 is coming, of course, but, given that the PS5 Pro already contains some of the latest AMD GPU hardware, I'm hoping that it won't take long to port over, and that the GTA 6 system requirements won't be too shocking.
Another potential ace up the sleeve for the GTA 6 PC port is for the latest upscaling and frame gen tech, such as AMD FSR, with the former unavailable on the latest PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and the latter only available on the PS5 Pro in its latest form. It took a very long time to get DLSS into the PC version of GTA 5, although DLSS wasn't released until 2019 and FSR in 2021. It would be shocking if this tech were absent on day one of the PC release, however.
Returning to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for a moment, this is potentially the best point of comparison we have right now, given how intense the game is at its Supreme graphical preset with ray-tracing maxed out. Even with Nvidia DLSS set to Quality and frame generation enabled, the RTX 4070 I'm currently using is only capable of an average frame rate of 9fps at 1080p in our testing. It wouldn't even run at 1440p.
Lowering the ray-tracing demands, but sticking with the Ultra graphical preset at 1440p, the average frame rate comes all the way up to 83fps, with a 1% low of 72fps, a result that is far more comforting.
My hope is that the GTA 6 PC port, whenever it is ready, scales much like any other modern game and is still playable for those on older gaming PCs, or even handhelds such as the Steam Deck.
Only time will tell if this is the case, and with the GTA 6 release date now somewhat set in stone, albeit for next year, it might be some time until we get any firm details on the PC release.
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