I try to avoid getting too enamoured by video game graphics. I’ve been around gaming for a long time, so I’ve seen several iterations of ‘this is the best gaming will ever look and is indistinguishable from real life’, and seen every time that, to both halves of that claim, it’s not. The latest game to reach that alleged pinnacle is GTA 6, and as impressive as it seems, the claim still isn’t true. Gaming will, eventually, look better, and GTA 6’s graphics remain distinguishable from real life. But boy, this is a close one.
There are a few isolated shots of GTA 6 I’ve seen that have excited me, despite my disposition for not getting excited over graphics. One shot shows a woman’s hand with chipped black nail polish and a faded heart tattoo holding a shimmering revolver (with trigger discipline to boot), and it looks mesmerising. My youth spent on goth girl tumblr puts a thumb on the scale, but still, it’s gorgeous.
But a lot of talk has been about a shot of protagonist Lucia Caminos in a pool, especially in comparison to a similarly staged shot from GTA 5. However, this is not an entirely fair comparison, and as impressive as GTA 6 looks, we shouldn’t diminish the foundations laid by its predecessor. This is a false analogy.
GTA 5 Graphics Vs GTA 6 Graphics
First posted two days ago on Reddit by u/SnooMacarons2931 and quickly shared around the internet, the comparative image shows a GTA 5 NPC with an expressionless face and stiff body standing in a pool while a cocktail glass, angular around the edges, sits on the side. Beneath that, we see Lucia full of life as she lazes on the edge of the pool with her elbows in all her photorealistic glory while a cosmo sits in a martini glass, so well defined that we see the reflection on the glassware and the mild translucent refraction of the strawberry inside.
This is a fair comparison in that it’s real. You can really take that shot in GTA 5 if you set it up, and the picture of Lucia is a catered screenshot released by Rockstar itself. I’m not complaining that this comparison exists, and seeing as GTA 5 was once one of those ‘this is the best gaming will ever look and is indistinguishable from real life’ titles back when it launched in 2013, it’s good to keep that perspective. However, it’s not exactly a fair fight.
The first is gameplay footage of a minor character who is unposed, featuring a close up of an asset only meant to be seen from a distance (the glass), in a location they were not designed to be in. The second is in-engine footage, rather than gameplay, and shows the protagonist specifically positioned by Rockstar’s own devs to make the tech look as impressive as possible, with every asset handpicked for this purpose. Of course, that Rockstar can pull this off at all is mightily impressive, but it’s essentially taking a late night selfie of GTA 5 mid-sneeze and comparing it to a glamour shot of GTA 6. It’s not the full glow up it’s being discussed as.
Just How Good Will GTA 6 Look?
The real question though is how much does any of this matter, and the answer is ‘as much as you want it to’. GTA 6 is going to look better than GTA 5, and unless the trailers have been wildly misleading, it could very well look better than any game ever. The comparison is therefore mostly harmless. But I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.
Right now, GTA 6 is the exciting thing far off in the future, so we’re all talking about how it will be the greatest game ever. The best game to play, the best game to look at, the best game to hear, possibly even the best game to smell. Then it will get here, and those impossible expectations will prove impossible, and the script will flip. We’ll pull out pictures of GTA 5 on its best day and GTA 6 on its worst to tear it down and ask with ludicrous disapproval “$100 for this?!”
This is all just a word of caution that if you’ve seen that picture (and you have, it’s a few inches above this on the screen), and you thought ‘I don’t remember GTA 5 looking like this’, well, you’re right. It didn’t. Not really. And chances are, as good as GTA 6 will be, it will not constantly look like a curated in-engine trailer, either. The truth will be somewhere in the middle, and we won’t know for sure until we’re sipping cosmos with Lucia next year.
Grand Theft Auto 6
- Released
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May 26, 2026
- Engine
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Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE)
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer
