GTA Trilogy News: Every graphic upgrade revealed so far for Definitive Edition

On October 22, Rockstar released a brief trailer revealing the GTA Definitive Edition trilogy. It focuses mainly on the new games' graphics improvements over the original trilogy, and they're fairly significant. The character models are a lot more cartoonish, but the environment appears to be quite detailed.

The remastered trilogy seems to be utilizing several modern graphical features, such as advanced lighting and shadows, volumetric fog, and increased draw distances. It has been designed specifically for modern hardware, and will certainly look wonderful on current consoles and GPUs.

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GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition: All the major graphical advancements made in the remastered games

Several graphical alterations can be discerned from watching the trailer, such as:

• Higher resolution textures
• Character models
• Lighting/reflections
• Improved water/weather effects
• Draw distance

The GTA remastered trilogy has higher resolution textures for environmental assets as well as vegetation. From the San Andreas countryside to the Liberty City skyline, everything looks much more realistic. However, the general art style has been retained for the characters, vehicles, weapons, and all other in-game items.

Character models have seen the greatest changes. They seem to be implementing a unique cartoonish look that many fans have compared to Saints Row and even Fortnite. Their textures are a lot better, including their clothing and fingers. The latter has been a major talking point among fans, especially since the older games had a simple hand model with joined fingers.

Lighting has been vastly upgraded too, with explosions creating their own light source. The light from explosions and other light sources is now diffused in the environment and other objects. Reflections are greatly enhanced too, with cars and roads reflecting their entire surroundings.

Another major change is the draw distance, which has been increased to modern standards. The original GTA trilogy had a severely limited draw distance, even when maxed. The maximum draw distance in the remastered GTA trilogy is more akin to newer games like GTA 5. The water and weather effects, which were barely noticeable in the original trilogy, are now much more visible.

Besides these, Rockstar has also stated that there will be some platform-exclusive features for the games. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will support up to 4K resolution textures and 60 FPS for the new games. PCs with Nvidia GPUs will be getting DLSS support for the Definitive Edition trilogy.