Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto 6's launch trailer yesterday, granting a precious 90 seconds of (mostly new) video of the upcoming juggernaut. We've now had a chance to analyse the video, and though it's impossible to say for sure, the footage suggests that a big issue we spotted with the game in earlier trailers has been fixed.

In short, the previous GTA 6 trailers have all demonstrated some animation pacing errors, where camera movements and character animations can appear jerky even when the game's overall frame-rate looks stable. This has been an unfortunate feature of past RAGE engine titles since Grand Theft Auto 4, so it wasn't a surprise to see it in the GTA 6 footage too.

In the new launch trailer, that characteristic inconsistency isn't present, including in slow pans and other shots where it would normally be visible. This is only a short trailer, of course, and Rockstar could have shot the video in a way that doesn't reveal the problem as overtly, but it could also suggest that this long-standing tech oddity has finally been fixed - assuming that the footage here is representative of the game. This was one of the two major issues we identified in the Extended Look footage, so seeing it seemingly solved is exciting.

Elsewhere, the trailer is classic Rockstar, with creative camera work, a huge range of different scenes and effects, and one that demonstrates the mastery of subtle phonomena, like the way that water droplets catch the sunlight and react against chest hair in the shower scene. It's fair to say that the entire video is lushly presented, even down to the extremely detailed iguana shown in the opening seconds of the trailer - which looks to have finally exceeded the herpetofaunal representation in similarly graphics-focused titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Crysis 3.

We also wanted to draw attention to some thoughts on the game's possible HDR presentation thanks to Filippo Tarpini, an HDR specialist that is best known for their work at game developer Remedy. Tarpini suspects that Rockstar might be using the AGX tone mapper, which could account for some colour shifts in the footage, such as blue light appearing purplish. There are also hints that Rockstar is using inverse tone mapping to create an HDR presentation from SDR-like material, but this is only an informed guess - we'll have to wait until we get solid information or see the game for ourselves to deliver a verdict on the HDR implementation.

One of the biggest questions surrounding the trailer is over whether it uses the new QSSR technique that Sony unveiled recently, bringing AI-based upscaling from the PS5 Pro to the base PS5. From our point of view, it's not clear one way or another, but we'd probably lean towards QSSR not being used - as the image quality did look good, but the cinematic shots used here just might have been selected to avoid the aliasing and image quality issues that were more prominent in the Extended Look trailer.

Again, the resolution here looks to be 1440p upscaled to 4K (albeit with black bars), and based on our testing of QSSR in Wolverine that kind of upscale seems to have a cost of around 4ms - which would be a lot of the 33ms budget to spend on upscaling, when 1440p is already a relatively high resolution. But really, we've seen so little of QSSR so far, we really need to see more titles to get to grips with its rendering cost and quality.

Overall, the launch trailer is another good indicator of how supremely polished the game is looking at this late stage. What we'd like to see is some kind of affirmation as to why the game is "best on PS5" and indeed what buyers should expect on each launch platform, as right now we can only speculate as to how features, image quality and performance will vary across the four consoles.

For now though, we'll leave it there. Stay tuned for more GTA 6 analysis as more materials are (hopefully) released in the run-up to launch on November 19th.