Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies.
It's been 13 years since the last Grand Theft Auto title came out, and after countless delays, leaks, and hitches, the next one is finally getting bigger on the horizon.
A lot has changed since 2013. Modern GPUs render games faster, "generate" frames when they need to, and most recently, make games look life-like. GPUs have been slowly moving inch-by-inch towards photorealistic graphics for years, but DLSS 5 was the landmark moment where it all seemed to get real, literally and figuratively.
I've tested GTA 5 with neural rendering before, but curious to see how the same technique would hold up on remasters of games released over twenty years ago, I decided to give it another pass. GTA 6 may arrive in 30 days, but I'm convinced we've arrived at photorealistic gaming before it.
GTA III
The first 3D GTA ever somehow gets neural rendering
I'd forgive anyone for mistaking one of these images for a photograph pulled from the internet, because a singular neural pass from DLSS 5, injected into the game through a ReShade add-on called Deep Fried Chicken (yes, really) is doing more for Liberty City's faces and streets than decades of texture mods ever managed. As you can see, DLSS 5's neural rendering layer is doing some extraordinary things to faces in GTA III which have never quite looked human.
GTA III isn't a game you'd ever find me playing. The first GTA game I ever experienced was San Andreas, and even that was four years after its polished PC release came out. Liberty City isn't a place I have much nostalgia for, as such. And yet, during my testing, all it took was the first thirty minutes of gameplay to make me want more of it.
The characters looked as though they belonged in the world around them, the map felt inhabited and animated, and the city itself felt like a place that you find a home in, much more than a categorical GTA-styled sandbox where you blow things up for fun and watch the chaos ensue. Neural rendering undoubtedly gave Liberty City a sense of "life" that I would've never thought a game that came out in 2001 could have in 2026, and that's highly ironic for an AI feature. Yet, here we are.
GTA San Andreas
Grove Street, home, like the way I remember it
GTA San Andreas was the GTA that I grew up with, the one I spent countless hours on, the reason why I know the lyrics to Toto's Hold the Line by heart, and if I ever get lost without a map in Los Angeles, the reason why I'd probably be fine.
It's also the reason why I was heartbroken to not find Las Venturas and San Fierro in GTA V. Not that it kept me from playing the story mode seventeen times anyway, but the absence of the two cities always made it seem like San Andreas had a hole that could not be filled. Seeing those two cities rendered in the Definitive Edition with DLSS 5 was liberating in a way that, I finally knew what it would have felt had they been a part of the newer game.
As for the visuals, I could probably talk from dusk till dawn. Everything was visually striking, from reflectivity on the panels of cars, the way the water behaves, to the way the Hydra cuts through the sky in bad weather. The Definitive Edition feels worthy of its name, albeit with DLSS 5 doing much of the heavy-lifting. If there's a way to revisit San Andreas and preserve even a little of what Grove Street felt like to me when I was eight, neural rendering would be it.
GTA Vice City
Suddenly, the new Vice City has a lot to live up to
What GTA San Andreas is to me, Vice City is to plenty of other gamers who grew up with Rockstar's games, and I have no doubts about that, because I know quite a few personally. I got to experience it first on an Nvidia GT 610, and the only thing I understood about the game at that age was that you had to steal cars. Grand Theft Auto, quite literally.
Vice City was a visually funny game. Tommy Vercetti sprinted funnily, could die from stepping into a puddle of still water, and the world around him was already jagged before 2002's consumer GPUs made it jagged-er still. It had a charm the sharpest edges couldn't ruin, which was a good thing, because the edges themselves were plentiful.
Watching this world through DLSS 5 is a pleasure through the eyes of a fan. When it rains, car headlights now paint puddles, neon transforms the ambience in a way that the original game engine was reaching for but could never, and the sunrise on the beach filled the sky with the kind of orange that I find it jarring to associate with a game that came out decades ago. Tommy Vercetti went from a character to a person, which is something he deserved just as much as Claude from GTA III.
Maybe DLSS 5 isn't so bad after all
Over the past few months, I've watched and, dare say, learned a lot from the online discourse surrounding artistic intent versus neural rendering, which are often presented as at odds with one another. But when I look at the game worlds that are more than 20 years old be transformed and brought to life through this technology in a way that it makes me want to revisit them more than I have in years, I'm led to believe that perhaps there is a right balance to be found after all. And maybe, just maybe there's a way that it's doing more for preservation than the remasters meant for exactly that purpose.