What engine does GTA 6 use? Our first video goes through everything Rockstar has said about it

The Leonida is on YouTube, and our first video is about the tech behind Grand Theft Auto VI. It goes through everything Rockstar Games' developers have said about how the game works, from weather that stays local to police who know what you're wearing, and lines each claim up against Rockstar's own footage. It runs just under eight minutes.

Here's what's in it, with the sources, starting with the engine's name.

What engine does GTA 6 use?

Rockstar's own. Phil Hooker, one of Rockstar North's heads of development, told Bloomberg Businessweek in October that the engine, the tools and the team built during GTA 6 will let Rockstar work faster on whatever comes next.

What Rockstar calls that engine is less clear. Its engine has had a name since at least February 2009, when Rockstar announced Red Dead Redemption: RAGE, short for Rockstar Advanced Game Engine. In 2013, Aaron Garbut, now one of Rockstar North's two co-studio heads, told TechRadar that RAGE began as a kit of parts, a basic renderer and a physics engine. "It was never a game engine," he said. Since Max Payne 3 in 2012, he explained, every Rockstar game had been built on one standard engine, and the version Rockstar refined for GTA V had, by his account, grown into the new RAGE.

But we couldn't find Rockstar using the name RAGE for GTA 6, in its own posts or in its developers' interviews. Nor could we find RAGE 9, a name that comes up often in searches for the game's engine. Our guide to who's making GTA 6 has more on the people quoted here.

Built from the ground up

Rockstar said on Nov. 10 that GTA 6 was built from the ground up for the current generation of consoles. Rob Nelson, Rockstar North's other co-studio head, told IGN in August that building it for this hardware let the team take advantage of all the memory the latest consoles have, and he pointed to Leonida's people, who vary more in height and build than ever. That took new work: characters used to share sets of animations, so a short person and a tall one wouldn't line up when they fought or sat in a car. The team now fits each animation to the body playing it, on the fly, Nelson said.

Rockstar's footage shows how far the game goes without a break. An Extended Look, Rockstar's 26-minute gameplay video from August, opens with one unbroken take of 2 minutes 38 seconds: off a street at night, through an open-air lobby, a hallway and an elevator, past a dog you can pet, scold or study, and down a corridor to door 907 and a prompt to knock.

600,000 animations

Rockstar told The New York Times that GTA 6 has over 600,000 animations, against 55,000 in GTA V and 300,000 in Red Dead Redemption 2, TechRadar reported, and Garbut said the studio art-directed its characters one by one, with a new team of writers, directors and producers in Los Angeles working only on them. Each pedestrian also has personality traits that shape how they react, Edge reports: temperament, aggression, where they are, what they've seen and how you've treated them. In the demo Edge watched, a man walking his dog took exception to Jason's stare, unclipped the leash, and the dog chased Jason down the street. Our GTA 6 and GTA 5 comparison has the other numbers.

Weather that stays put

Owen Shepherd, Rockstar's vice president of art for lighting and rendering, told Game Informer that Rockstar re-engineered its weather system so that conditions are far more local and last longer. You can stand in sunshine and watch a storm pour down somewhere else, Game Informer reports, then drive there once it passes and find the puddles still on the ground. Rainbows show up in the right light, and tropical storms and hurricanes are in the game.

GTA V's weather came in a few preset states, such as sunny or rainy, Edge notes, and Garbut said GTA 6's is far more granular. Clouds move on their own, Edge reports, pushed by wind, humidity, fog, the time of day and the season, and after a storm, buildings drip and surfaces dry at different speeds. The wind reaches the water too. Shepherd said gusts ripple the surface and bend the grass in the swamps, Kotaku reported from Game Informer's story. Islands and buildings shelter stretches of water, Edge reports, so a boat might skim across in one spot and get thrown around in another, as Garbut described it.

One thing we noticed: in Rockstar's trailers, An Extended Look and the Pre-Load Now video, we couldn't find a single shot of rain actually falling. The streets are wet, the puddles are there and the haze rolls in, but none of Rockstar's videos shows the rain itself yet. Our Game Informer story has more on the weather.

Longer days

The day and night cycle runs much longer than GTA V's, Edge reports, so sunsets linger and nights stretch out. When the team tried GTA V's timings, Nelson told the magazine, the day felt rushed in a world drawn at this level of detail. He said the same goes for its people: the sharper the world looks, the less it works to have a crowd that doesn't react when someone pulls out a shotgun.

Far more interiors

Garbut told Edge the number of interiors has grown by an order of magnitude over Rockstar's earlier games, and Edge describes rooms that look lived in, with photos on the walls, things piling up on tables and the clutter of the people who use them. In An Extended Look, an elevator opens onto a lobby and the pair walk straight out into the sun on a rooftop bar, with a prompt to hold hands. Another take runs 82 seconds, through two elevators to a dark office floor at night, without a cut. Nelson told IGN that the density of the world is part of the reason the team doubled in size. Our guide to going inside buildings has what Rockstar has said about them.

170 animal species

Game Informer reports over 170 animal species across land, air and sea. Look closely at Trailer 2, 42 seconds in: a cat is sitting on top of an ATM in a shop. Our animals guide lists the ones Rockstar has named.

Police who remember you

Every vehicle has a fuel gauge and a readout of engine health, Edge reports. The police go further. Nelson told IGN that GTA 6 has a heat system, in which the police know what you look like and what you're wearing. When you commit a crime, Edge explains, icons at the top of the screen show what they know: your description, whether you were alone, your clothes, whether a camera caught you and your weapon. Split up, change clothes or ditch the weapon, and that part of the description goes.

Pause An Extended Look at 14:06 and there are four red icons under the wanted stars: two heads, a clothes hanger, one head and a car. IGN, which saw the system in a demo with Nelson, says the hanger means the police know your clothes and the silhouette means they have your description, and Nelson pointed out that the police knew the pair were a couple and what they were driving. Edge also saw a stinger strip burst a tire and a police dog bring Jason down; neither has appeared in Rockstar's videos yet. Our Edge story has the rest of that demo.

On your console

Rockstar gave a frame rate for the first time on Nov. 10: GTA 6 targets 30 frames per second on the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. On the PS5 Pro, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, Sony's upscaling, sharpens the picture, and only the Pro gets ray-traced shadows. On Xbox Cloud Gaming, the game streams with the Xbox Series S's settings. Rockstar hasn't given a resolution for any console. Our story on the 30fps target has the rest.

Why rebuild so much?

By GTA V's later versions, Edge reports, newer hardware let Rockstar push the view distance and fill the streets with more cars and people, but the systems underneath stayed largely as they were. Nelson told the magazine there was no way to pull the game apart and rework systems such as traffic or law enforcement. Rockstar started doing exactly that with Red Dead Redemption 2, Edge says, rebuilding its open world around crime, witnesses and how people behave, and by 2015, with that game still deep in production, the team was already thinking about how to carry those lessons into GTA.

Garbut told Bloomberg Businessweek that Rockstar changed a lot at the foundations while making GTA 6 and doesn't plan to tear it all up again, and Hooker said the engine, tools and team it built will let Rockstar move faster, so the next game shouldn't take as long. Our guide to how long GTA 6 took to make has the timeline. Garbut's own image for the result, in Edge: a pyramid built on top of Everest.

About the video

The video uses only Rockstar's footage and names the source of every claim on screen. More videos are coming to our YouTube channel, and we're @theleonidacom on X and Instagram too. GTA 6 comes out Nov. 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.