Judging from the Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar Games may be heavily leaning into ray tracing with the next entry in the series.

　　A new analysis shared by the tech experts at Digital Foundry highlights how ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections can be clearly spotted in the game's reveal trailer in the internal scenes with strong exterior light sources, where light bounce looks realistic and in the car sequence where the wing mirror reflection shows detail that is not present in the screen space. Rockstar Games may also be using a hybrid solution combining both software and hardware ray tracing, as highlighted by some of these sequences in the trailer.

　　What Rockstar Games seems to be ditching in Grand Theft Auto VI over the current-generation update for GTA V are ray-traced shadows, which look to be absent from the reveal trailer. Ray-traced global illumination and reflections may be pushing the ray tracing capabilities of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X to the limits, so it wouldn't be surprising for Rockstar to do away with some ray tracing features to achieve the visual goals they have in mind for their game.

　　Grand Theft Auto VI launches on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S sometime in 2025. We will keep you updated on the game as soon as more come in in it, so stay tuned for all the latest news.