There's a decent chance you've never noticed it, but most of Rockstar's titles – including the likes of Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5 and the Red Dead Redemption games – have a subtle but persistent graphical bug. Based on the early trailers and gameplay footage, it looked like GTA 6 would be no exception, but the game's most recent trailer shows no evidence of the issue at all.
The problem? Animation stutter. Both character animations and camera movements are sometimes unevenly paced, leading to a herky-jerky effect that can give these games an unintentional appearance of stop motion. If you notice it, it might seem like the game is dropping frames, but the real problem seems to be tied to the underlying RAGE engine that's been powering Rockstar's games since the GTA 4 days.
According to Digital Foundry, this issue has also been present in every GTA 6 trailer released up until this point, including the extended gameplay look. Except, that is, for the recently released launch trailer, which is completely clear of any apparent animation stutter. That's despite the fact that it uses extensive panning camera shots, where the stutter is typically most obvious.
It's possible that this trailer simply featured a curated selection of scenes without the animation stutter, but given that Rockstar made no effort to hide this issue in previous previews, that seems unlikely. The devs have, after all, made clear that they're still tweaking things up until the very last minute.
Could the stutter finally be fixed after decades of it plaguing the developer's games? I guess we'll find out in one month's time.
Still figuring out where to pre-order GTA 6? You know where to click.
