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If you’ve been in the gaming enthusiast arena for a long time, you’ll be familiar with the phrase ‘bullshots’.
We don’t hear it very often anymore – I did a quick search through the Push Square archives, and I haven’t used it in a headline since 2016 – but for those who don’t know it basically refers to screenshots that have been “touched up” after the fact.
You’d see this a lot during the PS3 era, when devs would render out images of their games at much higher resolutions, obscuring the aliasing and inconsistencies of the real-world product.
And tech experts Digital Foundry hypothesise that Rockstar may be doing a little of that with its latest round of GTA 6 screenshots.
Here’s what it says exactly:
“With such a high level of fidelity on show, then, a question still dangles over which platform is actually being used to generate these shots. To be clear, we find it unlikely that these are real-time results on PS5, Xbox Series X – or in the best case on console, PS5 Pro. We’d like to be pleasantly surprised of course, and this will be firmly answered once it releases. However in many instances the combination of pristine image quality, suggesting a native 4K render (or higher), and inconsistent lighting on foreground characters casts doubt over how feasible it is.”
The big takeaway from its analysis is the cutting-edge ray tracing that’s being used in each image, which gives the scenes a level of depth seldom seen in most console games.
It’s something I spotted poring over the pictures as well: there’s a density to puddles, windows, and reflective surfaces that goes far beyond the standard screen-space reflections (SSR) you see in most other games.
While I won’t get too giddy with explaining the technology here, SSR works by “reflecting” details already seen on the screen. This can lead to some strange pop-in and inaccuracies, as in the real-world surfaces often reflect things you can’t see, right?
Obviously ray tracing resolves this issue by simulating the way light bounces off materials, meaning there are details you can see in GTA 6’s reflections which are obscured by other objects.
In terms of consoles, there’s simply no doubt that the PS5 Pro will be best positioned to deal with this complicated technology, but I’d share Digital Foundry’s scepticism that there’ll likely be cutbacks in the final product across all systems.
Either way, until Rockstar shows more, this is something worth keeping in mind.