A Rockstar Games employee has revealed some interesting insights about the company’s RAGE Engine. But did he also accidentally confirm that Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PC?
As reported by Dexerto, Principal Engine Programmer Ryan Woods has shared some interesting details about the progress on RAGE Engine on his LinkedIn.
We won’t be linking or quoting his LinkedIn, because it has since been updated. But we’ll quote Dexerto on what he originally wrote in there, as his work for Rockstar:
“Lead performance profiling and optimization efforts, pushing the limits of real-time rendering and processing to maintain smooth performance across multiple platforms, including next-gen consoles and PC.”
That may all sounds like very technical language, but Woods is simply taking credit for his work making RAGE Engine games run better on PC, as well as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Now, we want to be clear that we don’t agree with Dexerto here, that this proves Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming to PC. If we were honest about it, we know that it’s happening anyway, regardless of how long it will take.
But of course, there’s tons of RAGE Engine games that have already come to PC, including both Red Dead Redemption games, as well as Grand Theft Auto V. So Woods’ work may have already borne fruit for those titles, and not necessarily for this upcoming game, that won’t even be coming to PC at launch.
Still, Woods also claimed some very impressive improvements to RAGE Engine, that would be easier to see coming to PC, at least before they get adapted to consoles or other platforms. He wrote this:
“Drive the integration of new technologies and research into the engine pipeline, such as ray tracing, ray-traced global illumination, procedural generation for objects and game environments, and various other technical systems within the engine core.”
Gamers will definitely be familiar with the terms ray tracing and global illumination. Some gamers may be unhappy that these visual effects can hamper games from performing at 60 FPS. But without these effects, they just won’t look like current generation games.
Procedural generation is not necessarily new for video games either, nor is that true for realistic video games. But for a game at the scale of Grand Theft Auto 6, Rockstar would have definitely needed to push that technology forward, beyond what any other studio or game has accomplished before.
We are talking about a persistent large open world, with no loading screens, that will also be running some level of random generation. Depending on how its implemented, it could simply keep players from getting bored at seeing the same things over and over. But Rockstar could have also implemented a subtle, effective level of randomness, that enhances the sense of realism and immersion.
And this may not necessarily be PC exclusive features either. With the scale of the work done on the project, it’s possible that Rockstar has refined these systems to the degree that we will see them in operation in PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S when Grand Theft Auto 6 is finally released next year. So there’s a lot to look forward to that’s Grand Theft Auto 6 related, regardless of how long we have to wait for it to come to PC.
