We'll be tackling platform comparisons in another article (truth is, we only received code the day before release - and this work takes time) so our focus today is on what it is that the new version offers over existing versions of the game. If you're coming from the last-gen console experience, what kind of upgrades are you getting? And if you've previously played the abundantly scalable PC rendition of GTA5, just how close does the new version compare to the maxed out experience? For our tests, we concentrated and the PlayStation 5 rendition of the game, finding that the new hardware delivers a vastly improved user experience even before you start playing it!
I'm not just talking about loading, but also installation. After downloading GTA5 on PS4, I discovered that a further installation period was required, which took over an hour (!). There's far less friction on PS5 - just press play and you're straight into the introductory videos and from there into the 60fps menus. Full frame-rate menus might not sound like a big deal, but remarkably they're running at 30fps on last-gen consoles and even the PC version. Rockstar Social Club logins are a thing (skippable for single-player), but moving from menu to story mode takes around 20 seconds - far faster than PS4, where the same process takes two minutes and eight seconds on my system.
Three rendering modes are on offer: fidelity at 4K30, performance at 1440p60 and performance RT, also at 1440p60. Those higher frame-rate modes are a dramatic improvement over the last-gen renditions of the game, capped at 30fps instead. Obviously, there's more visual feedback but the improved frame-rate also mitigates a lingering issues with GTA5 - very high input lag. Returning to the game today, it's unacceptably high and just about bearable in the 60fps modes.
Not only that, but compared to the PC version, Rockstar has improved the 60fps implementation. While 60fps was easily achievable on PC, it had issues: character animation wasn't running at 60fps, even when the renderer was, while camera pans also stuttered. On the new console builds, character movement is much improved but I still get the feeling that the camera motion in cutscenes could be better - and it still does not look like a proper 60fps to me. It's an improvement then, but not quite perfect: cloth effects still run at a lower frame-rate along with other incidental animations. Still, this is an improvement over PC and a night and day boost compared to the last-gen consoles.
Adding to this enhanced fluidity are changes to image processing. In the last-gen version, motion blur was camera-based, with sparing use of per-object blur in the first-person mode. In the new version, per-object motion blur is universally applied throughout the full game. It's subtle at 60fps and more noticeable in the 30fps fidelity mode, which looks much improved compared to the last-gen game running at the same frame-rate.
Another aspect of this new sense of smoothness is due to image quality improvements. Back on PlayStation 4, the game ran at 1080p with a simple FXAA-like post-process anti-aliasing effect, typical for the time period of release, but exhibiting plenty of shimmer, dithering and other stability issues. PC introduced MSAA and a temporal solution from Nvidia known as TXAA, while retaining FXAA if you wanted it too. You could improve console image quality on PC then, but the costs for doing so rendering-wise were significant. The new versions introduce a temporal anti-aliasing solution more in line with today's technology, similar to Red Dead Redemption 2. Shimmering, dithering and noise are all significantly reduced to the point where in some respects, GTA5 at 1440p on PS5 looks preferable to PC at native 4K.
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