GTA 6: Why the Ferris Wheel Reflection is Missing
▼ Summary
– A new GTA 6 trailer shows the game’s cover art and 80s music to announce its pre-order date, and Rockstar’s website features a new video clip of Vice City’s skyline at night.
– Fans noticed a Ferris wheel in the clip casts no reflection on the water, unlike other objects, sparking speculation about whether it is a bug.
– The game uses a hybrid reflection system, combining ray tracing and screen space reflections (SSR), with ray tracing applied to the bay’s water.
– The missing Ferris wheel reflection is likely due to ray tracing being configured to exclude certain objects from its pass to save GPU performance.
– SSR is used as a fallback but does not cover the Ferris wheel, and the final game may tweak this ray tracing quirk.
A newly released trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 has given fans another glimpse of Vice City, this time showcasing the game’s cover art and a pre-order announcement backed by 80s-inspired music. Rockstar also updated its website with a scrolling video clip that pans across the city’s nighttime skyline, featuring a wide central bay packed with intricate details,tennis courts in the foreground, towering skyscrapers in the distance. Yet, one odd detail has sparked debate among sharp-eyed players: a Ferris wheel on the far side of the bay casts no reflection in the water. While everything else shimmers on the surface, this amusement ride remains conspicuously absent. Is it a bug, or something more deliberate?
Let’s break down the technical side. Previous analysis of GTA 6‘s first two trailers confirmed that ray traced reflections are part of the game. This latest footage supports that, showing a hybrid approach combining ray tracing with screen space reflections (SSR). Ray tracing is clearly at work across the bay, mirroring the geometric mesh of nearby buildings,though without shadows or ambient occlusion. This suggests the RAGE engine is configured to save GPU performance, likely by limiting the accuracy of lighting and shading in reflections. The result? The reflected image appears brighter than the source object, and more importantly, ray tracing can be programmed to exclude certain objects based on the game’s Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH). That Ferris wheel, situated at a similar distance as surrounding structures, simply isn’t flagged to reflect via ray tracing.
This isn’t necessarily a permanent flaw. It’s likely a ray tracing quirk that could be refined before launch. The upside? The footage shows no occlusion artefacts on the water, which would plague a pure SSR approach. Skyscrapers don’t disrupt the reflection as they move near the frame’s edges, and helicopters flying overhead don’t cause glitches either. The reflection remains stable throughout. SSR does appear as a fallback method, filling in some blanks at the screen’s edges, but it doesn’t cover the Ferris wheel either.
In short, neither ray tracing nor SSR is set to mirror that Ferris wheel. Factors like camera distance,especially critical for ray tracing,are beyond our control in this brief 10-second clip. We’ll need to wait for the final game to fully understand the system, but for now, this offers a plausible explanation for the missing reflection.
(Source: Digitalfoundry.net)
