For 18 years, Rockstar has been developing its own graphics engine which has allowed it to break away from industry limitations.
And Grand Theft Auto VI is probably one of the most anticipated productions in history, it is not only because it is the sequel to one of the best-selling video games, and which continues to sell by the million every year. In its secret recipe for establishing itself in the industry, Rockstar can also count on a far from trivial ally: its graphics engine, which it controls from start to finish.
If Epic Games' Unreal Engine is used by the majority of studios today, for example in Fortnite or the next games Halothere are still a few “refractory Gauls” like Rockstar who have RAGE, for Rockstar Advanced Game Engine.
A new engine to control everything
Back in 2005: Rockstar is just coming out of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. He left his mark on video games on Playstation 2, and nothing seems to stop this success. However, a grain of sand shakes up the studio which then uses Renderware, an engine developed by Criterion, the creator of Burnout. I study them had just been bought that year by Electronic Arts, which pushed Rockstar to repatriate its forces to design the RAGE, with the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii in its sights.
To do this, the developers will rely on the work carried out by their San Diego subsidiary, then in charge of the series. Midnight Cluba game focused on street racing, which for its part developed the Angel Game Engine on which RAGE is based.
The main advantage of this is that it is flexible as desired, and above all that it can be used on many platforms. To show that RAGE has a future, Rockstar San Diego then developed Table Tennisa table tennis game, which demonstrates the capabilities of the engine, particularly on lighting effects and physics, but also the realism of the players.
Enough to arm Rockstar North then in the middle of construction on Grand Theft Auto IV.
A RAGE on console, not on PC
The release in 2008 of the title will once again confirm all the good things that Rockstar thinks of RAGE, since it also adapts to the large open world of GTA 4. The interactions between the different characters, the sometimes improbable situations in which the player can find themselves, but also the absence of loading times during the exploration phases are all qualities which demonstrate that the bet is successful.
Over the years, Rockstar added support for several technologies to improve the physics engine to support shooting effects. Max Payne 3another flagship saga from the publisher.
But if Rockstar developed RAGE for consoles, its main drawback is that it is not standardized. This is why PC ports of Rockstar games sometimes take a long time. With their hands dirty, developers sometimes have to spend many months before being able to offer a PC version, as Mike York, a former 3D animator at the studio, confirmed in 2023: “There is always a PC version of the game, but it is not always really perfect at the beginning, it is mainly a question of polishing the experience on the consoles.
Furthermore, the very different architectures from one user to another on computers force Rockstar to adapt, whereas on Playstation and Xbox, the technical specifications hardly change: “On Playstation and Xbox, the architecture and chips graphics are the same on the millions of copies sold on PC, each person has a different configuration, a different processor, a different graphics card,” adds Mike York.
Especially since in the meantime, the different Rockstar studios have sometimes moved on to a completely different project. It is for this reason that Red Dead Redemption the first of the name was finally only able to see the light of day on PC 14 years after the console version. It comes out this October 29, 2024, and was particularly awaited by fans, when Red Dead Redemption 2 was entitled to a PC version a year after its launch on Xbox One and Playstation 4. For the occasion, it was the English studio Double Eleven which took care of it to give Rockstar a free hand.
Over the years, the RAGE engine has actually been designed to support the needs of Rockstar developers. The vastness of the world presented in the first trailer for GTA 6 is ultimately the best argument: to be able to offer players a world with infinite possibilities, which will probably allow them to do anything without any limits, the engine is designed to respond to this demand.
When Ubisoft uses its own engines to replicate a formula across different licenses (Assassin’s Creed), RAGE responds to a need to create an open universe where the only limit will be the imagination of developers and players.
With GTA 6, Rockstar takes risks
This is why with Grand Theft Auto VIRockstar plays very big. Still accompanied by RAGE (this time in version 9), the studio will take the opportunity to significantly improve its engine so that it is only suitable for new generation consoles, such as the PS5 and the Xbox Series. But it must also support all the technologies added since their respective releases.
We think in particular of ray-tracing (to improve the effects of light reflection) or even scaling techniques, such as FSR or DLSS, and even the Playstation 5 Pro, much more powerful than its big sister the PS5.
If Rockstar has, for years, relied on versions 7 and 8 of its engine, the arrival of GTA 6 therefore risks changing everything with RAGE 9. The rendering of an open world is no longer the same as in 2013 when GTA 5or that in 2018, with Red Dead Redemption 2.
Currently planned for 2025, GTA 6 could therefore be postponed if the technical performances are not there. This is probably why the title is already seeing the cost of its development soar, easily exceeding $500 million, according to analysts.
