Grand Theft Auto 5’s new ray tracing on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S looks fantastic

Grand Theft Auto V now has ray-traced reflections on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles. A new patch, spotted by Eurogamer, brings ray-traced reflections to the game’s fidelity mode (30fps), adding a lot more realistic detail to vehicles, characters, windows, and basically any glossy surfaces. The results are truly impressive.

Now if you walk up to a window your character’s reflection will appear, or if you venture into areas where there is water or puddles you’ll see reflections of the objects nearby. Much like the ray tracing we’ve seen in Cyberpunk 2077, it makes the game feel more immersive.

It’s a rare example of how ray-traced reflections can greatly impact the way a game looks. We’ve seen impressive results of ray tracing on consoles with Cyberpunk 2077, Watch Dogs: Legion, and Spider-Man Remastered, but it’s still not common to see ray-traced reflections in console games.

Fortnite also recently received a patch to enable Unreal Engine 5.1 support, complete with Lumen and Nanite support. Lumen is Epic’s new dynamic global illumination tool that works in real time to provide far more accurate lighting in games. Nanite virtualizes geometry, and both technologies were particularly impressive during an initial PlayStation 5 demo before the console’s release.

The latest Fortnite patch also changes the way the game looks, albeit not necessarily due to ray tracing. Unreal Engine 5 will have a big impact on the next wave of console games, and we’ve already seen what it’s capable of supporting in a jaw-dropping Matrix Awakens tech demo. The real-time rendering and ray tracing created a photorealistic video game city that was full of life and unlike anything we’ve seen before. Now we just have to cross our fingers and hope that we’ll eventually get a good game based on The Matrix.