GTA 6 launch trailer shows no clear sign of PS5 QSSR
Digital Foundry sees no clear evidence of Sony's new upscaler in the PS5 footage, but the final game may still use it.
Grand Theft Auto 6's latest launch trailer has not shown clear evidence that Sony's new QSSR upscaler is running on the base PlayStation 5. The footage was captured on PS5, but the technical analysis that followed points to a game already targeting a high internal resolution rather than an obvious QSSR presentation. 1
What the trailer does — and does not — show
Sony introduced QSSR as a refined upscaling system for base PS5 consoles. It is already being used in first-party games including Marvel's Wolverine, while third-party developers can also adopt it. That made Grand Theft Auto 6 a natural candidate for the technology, particularly after Rockstar's marketing positioned the game as playing best on PS5. 1
Digital Foundry's Rich Leadbetter examined the trailer and said he did not think viewers were seeing QSSR in the footage. His reasoning is not that the technology cannot appear in the finished game, but that the trailer does not offer convincing evidence of it. If Grand Theft Auto 6 is rendering internally at roughly 1440p and scaling to 4K, Leadbetter argued, the extra processing cost could be difficult to justify. 12
That matters because an upscaler is not automatically an upgrade in every situation. QSSR has to improve image quality enough to outweigh the rendering time it consumes. Leadbetter estimated that the cost observed in Marvel's Wolverine could take a noticeable slice of a 33-millisecond frame budget, leaving Rockstar to decide whether sharper reconstruction is worth the trade-off elsewhere. 2
The final game may still change the answer
This is analysis of trailer footage, not a technical specification from Rockstar. The launch trailer may have been captured from an earlier build, and the final release could use different reconstruction settings. Rockstar's official site lists Grand Theft Auto 6 for 19 November 2026 and confirms the game is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with PS5 as the platform on which it plays best. 13
So the careful conclusion is that QSSR has not been confirmed in the trailer, rather than that it has been ruled out of the finished game. More definitive testing will have to wait for release hardware and retail code.
Our opinion
The interesting part here is not whether a logo-worthy feature appears in a marketing video. It is whether Grand Theft Auto 6 can deliver a stable, sharp image without spending too much of its performance budget on reconstruction. A native-looking 1440p target that holds its frame rate may be a better result than a more ambitious upscaler that leaves less room for the game's dense world.
Until independent testing can compare the final game with and without QSSR, this is best treated as an open technical question — not a missing feature confirmed by a trailer.