Grand Theft Auto 5’s ‘next-gen’ upgrade is the best version yet – but it could have been better

Grand Theft Auto 5 arrived this week with a new update designed to leverage the capabilities of the new wave of games consoles. That’s quite the thing: we’re talking about a title that first launched in 2013 on PS3 and Xbox 360 before being revamped for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. With the arrival of this new premium edition, Rockstar’s mega-selling game now arrives on its third generation of gaming hardware with the promise of three quality modes, including the addition of hardware accelerated ray tracing features.

We’ll be tackling platform comparisons in another article (truth is, we only received code the day before release – and this work takes time) so our focus today is on what it is that the new version offers over existing versions of the game. If you’re coming from the last-gen console experience, what kind of upgrades are you getting? And if you’ve previously played the abundantly scalable PC rendition of GTA5, just how close does the new version compare to the maxed out experience? For our tests, we concentrated and the PlayStation 5 rendition of the game, finding that the new hardware delivers a vastly improved user experience even before you start playing it!

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