Technical Details of the GTA 6 Launch Trailer

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The launch trailer for GTA 6 has drawn praise from the gaming community, and experts have now examined its technical side. Digital Foundry and HDR and color grading specialist Filippo Tarpini each shared observations about the footage.

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Digital Foundry
Filippo Tarpini

Digital Foundry

After analyzing the footage, Digital Foundry reached several conclusions.

Frame rate: 30 FPS.
Resolution: 1440p upscaled to 4K.
Level of detail: Digital Foundry described it as unprecedented.
Visual effects: the team pointed to the effects themselves and their combinations, including the way water interacts with light.
Animation: a long-standing issue appears to be gone. Every previous Grand Theft Auto VI showcase had a problem that has also affected games running on the RAGE engine since GTA 4 and persisted in later titles. Camera movements and character animations often looked jerky even when the frame rate remained stable. This time, the issue wasn’t apparent, even in scenes where it would normally have been immediately noticeable.
Upscaling: there is no confirmation of QSSR (Quick Spectral Super Resolution). This is Sony’s new AI-powered technology that brings image upscaling to the base PS5. The PS5 Pro has a more advanced version, PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution).

The DF team also expressed disappointment that Rockstar Games has yet to provide technical details about GTA VI. That includes the additional benefits available on PS5 Pro and what players can expect from the game on Xbox Series X/S.

Filippo Tarpini

Filippo Tarpini, an HDR and color grading specialist who previously worked at Remedy, shared the following observations.

In certain shots, blue and red lights appear to take on unnatural purple and pink hues, respectively. This could indicate that the game isn’t outputting native HDR (High Dynamic Range) but is instead converting SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) content to HDR. The developers may be using AgX, a tone-mapping algorithm designed to process color and brightness.

However, this remains a theory. The only way to determine how HDR actually works in the game will be to test the final version on a suitable TV or monitor.

Let’s analyze tonemapping in GTA 6!
Launch trailer is SDR but still gives us insight into how they are working with colors.

Overall, what I see looks nice. Nothing appears particularly broken with one big exception.
Gradients are smooth. Skin tones are great. Hue paths/shifts are ok. There’s a lot of clipping but that’s unavoidable in SDR.
However… as often happens: bright blue turns purple! See the pool jump scene below.
This is a typical trait of tonemapping per channel, Unreal/ACES have a “blue correction” feature to remedy this problem, which introduces more issues like banding.

So, our best guess is that they are using AgX!
It’s per channel, it usually doesn’t escape this problem, in fact it can even make it worse given it has no gamut adaptation. AgX produces colors that are not representable by sRGB, and then clips them, which causes hue shifts like blue->purple.
As proof of that, we have the broken gradients around the pool lights (“banding”), If we tweak levels we can see edges very clearly.

Continues ⬇️.

— Filippo Tarpini (@FilippoTarpini) October 16, 2026

Source: GTA.com.ua

Digital Foundry

Filippo Tarpini

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