Face-Off: Grand Theft Auto 5

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Never a series short on ambition, Grand Theft Auto's latest instalment brings to life one of the most beautiful and lavishly detailed sandbox worlds of the current generation. Long-time readers will recall that GTA4 represented a similar milestone moment in the showdown between PS3 and 360 back in 2008, with each version handling the newly-forged RAGE engine with unique visual trade-offs and Microsoft's platform taking a lead in the performance stakes. Five years on it's high tide for round two: the core engine work has seen great upheaval and the 49 virtual square miles of game world are impeccably presented on both platforms. Once again though there are key advantages to either side.
At its heart, RAGE is comprised of mostly in-house developed parts, from the animation engine and rendering framework to a bespoke scripting language - allowing developer Rockstar North to custom-tailor unique events for missions, and even design mini-games such as golf and tennis. But its core strength, stemming back to earlier iterations on PS2, is its ability to stream assets such as textures, buildings and oncoming vehicles seamlessly on memory-limited hardware. Level-of-detail scaling is used subtly, and in the case of thick, urban sprawls, skyscrapers act as occluders to allow culling of unseen geometry. Given the tight memory budgets of the PS3 and 360, tricks like these are crucial for keeping the game running at a fair clip, and to avoid abrupt pop-in.
For PS3 in particular, the technology has come a long way in harnessing the console's notoriously finicky split-pool setup for RAM. The limitation evidently proved to be a roadblock for budgeting on the video memory side with GTA4, where the decision was made to render at a native resolution of 1152x640 - a 20 per cent cut-down compared to the Microsoft release. Thankfully this has now been addressed, and for the latest entry the PS3 version matches the 360's full 1280x720 framebuffer. It looks gloriously clear, and image quality is now identical down to the pixel.
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