The GTA 6 community has once again demonstrated its ability to make a mountain out of a molehill. Recently, in conjunction with the announcement of the pre-order date, Rockstar Games released a new clip showing the night scene of "Sin City" on its official website. While players were admiring this picturesque scenery, a sharp-eyed user discovered a detail, which instantly caused an uproar among the fan community.
A Reddit user named mr-buttons_007 pointed out that the reflection of the Ferris wheel on the other side of the bay in the clip is not as clearly reflected on the water as the surrounding buildings and lights. This discovery quickly ignited players' concerns, and the comment area was filled with arguments such as "the picture is not complete" and "it needs more time to polish". Some players have even half-jokingly threatened to cancel pre-orders, and some emotional fans have even begun to predict that the game will be delayed again.
This turmoil attracted the attention of Digital Foundry, a well-known technical analysis media. After professional analysis, they quickly solved the mystery. It turns out that "GTA6" uses a hybrid reflection system that combines ray tracing reflection and screen space reflection (SSR).
Digital Foundry analysis believes that the reason why the Ferris wheel "disappears" in the reflection is probably due to performance optimization considerations. In order to ensure smooth game operation, developers may use technologies such as Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) to deliberately exclude some distant objects from ray tracing calculations to save graphics card resources. Therefore, the Ferris wheel is either not included in the calculation because it is too far away, or it is an intentional compromise made by the development team to stabilize the frame rate.
Digital Foundry emphasized that what players are currently seeing is still a work-in-progress version of the game, and the game is still months away from its official release. This small picture detail may be fixed before the official version is released, so fans don’t have to worry about it.
It is worth mentioning that just before the opening of pre-orders, the potential selling price of "GTA6" was also leaked online, and the price of the top version was revealed to be as high as 200 euros. However, all this still needs to wait for the official announcement when pre-orders open on June 25.
"GTA6" will be launched on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S platforms on November 19, 2026, and pre-orders will be officially launched on June 25.