GTA Online on PC will finally catch up to console versions in 2025

[zohaibahd]

Highly anticipated: Grand Theft Auto Online's PC players have been eagerly anticipating the current-gen console upgrades to make their way to the PC version for years now. Well, the wait is finally over... kind of. Rockstar casually slipped in the news that the highly requested PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S features are coming to the PC platform sometime in 2025.

The announcement was buried at the bottom of a recent GTA Online community update.

"There is much more still to come, including ongoing weekly special events and bonuses, festive celebrations, gifts, surprises, as well as plans to bring the much-requested PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S features of GTA Online to the PC platform in the new year. Please stay tuned to the Rockstar Games Newswire for details," notes the release.

As for what these "much-requested" features are, they're related to the enhanced edition of GTA V that launched for PS5 and Xbox Series consoles back in 2022. With it arrived a host of visual and gameplay improvements. From a graphics perspective, it introduced goodies like more presets, ray-traced shadows, improved anti-aliasing, better lighting, and other enhancements, such as increased population and traffic variety.

Beyond visuals, there were new features that included unique vehicle upgrades, quality of life improvements to areas like the introduction and tutorial, and the new Hao's Special Works auto shop with exclusive customization options. It also added the ability to transfer story mode progress and GTA Online characters from old-gen to new-gen consoles.

While the PC version already looks great graphically, it's been lacking those extra bells and whistles found in the next-gen console release for the last couple of years. So it's no surprise that fans have been lobbying for PC parity pretty much since the enhanced versions hit. But Rockstar has historically favored their more lucrative console fanbase as opposed to PC. Players had already given up hope, so this announcement will definitely cheer them up.

The rest of the announcement details more of the new content coming to GTA Online across all platforms in the December update. This includes new stuff to do at the Darnell Bros Garment Factory, Dispatch Work missions, fresh vehicles to customize, Job Creator updates, and more.

The bottom line is there's plenty to keep players occupied until the update lands. Beyond that, GTA 6 is targeting a 2025 release too, at least on consoles.

For PC, the track record hasn't been great. GTA 3 took seven months to arrive on PC following the console release, San Andreas and GTA IV both took eight, while GTA V took a whopping two years. Hopefully, things will be different this time.

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GTA Online on PC will finally catch up to console versions in 2025

 

[DukeJukem]

Consumer - Buys flagship product (PC) expecting flagship quality games.

Game Developer(s) - Makes console version not suck and gives them more content first.

Consumer - Quits favorite hobby, dies on the inside, works their life away and picks up fishing instead. Yawn.

What's the point of owning a PC anymore when it comes to hobby related things, honestly? Everything is becoming a monetized, broken piece of spyware that has no special shine to it.

 

[Dimitriid]

Well even after removing Linux support due to the recent update to BattlEye the game is still basically unplayable in public lobbies: most cheat tools just updated immediately and bypassed so they basically downgraded away from the Steam Deck for no good reason.

The ray tracing stuff was pretty poorly done on consoles and the game is so ancient at this point that it hardly matters. The HSW vehicles would be nice (Those are the custom ones: they produce the fastest vehicles in the game by far) but I doubt many people would be installing the game to play like one week on the HSW updated stuff before it's back to cheaters being able to literally crash the game as soon as they see you enter a public lobby so it's still basically just invite-only affairs and that looses a good chunk of the online content specially on the latest update anyway.

This is probably get them like a boost on sales and microtransaction for like 2 to 3 weeks then it's back to who gives a (!@#(

 

[FaTaL]

Game Developer(s) - Makes console version not suck and gives them more content first.

While I am a dedicated PC user over console, I have to defend game developers here.
Consoles are 100x easier to code for because its for basically 2 platforms (mostly)... Playstation + Xbox.
Thats 2 different sets of hardware and 2 operating systems with only core modules.

PC
1000+ different hardware combinations / peripherals / interface adjustments / monitor config etc.
10,353 additional modules/background apps/anti-cheat integration etc..

PC can push the limits better, but man they are a pain in the fckin *** to code for.

 

[poshflamingos]

While I am a dedicated PC user over console, I have to defend game developers here.
Consoles are 100x easier to code for because its for basically 2 platforms (mostly)... Playstation + Xbox.
Thats 2 different sets of hardware and 2 operating systems with only core modules.

PC
1000+ different hardware combinations / peripherals / interface adjustments / monitor config etc.
10,353 additional modules/background apps/anti-cheat integration etc..

PC can push the limits better, but man they are a pain in the fckin *** to code for.

WTF are you on about? That's not how any of this works.

First of all, most devs don't "code for hardware" at all, they use third-party engines where all the low level programming like that is already done for them in advance.

Second, even if a developer is using an in-house engine that they developed, you still don't code engines for specific combinations of hardware. That is the entire point of the existance of middleware like DirectX and Vulkan, those APIs define standards that are followed by both hardware manufacturers and software developers, and the middleware's job is to ensure they are compatible with each other so long as the standards have been followed. An engine dev for PC doesn't need to think about "combinations of hardware", they just code it for DirectX and it works with any hardware also built to support DirectX.

Even when games get optimizations for specific GPU architectures, those optimizations are done via driver updates by Nvidia and AMD themselves, game devs aren't the ones who do it.

 

[Starfals]

Lazy Rockstar... For the top dog.. they sure dont do alot. Look at RDR 1... ugh.

 

[Keivz]

Doubt we’ll get ray traced anything as it’s a dx 11 game but I’ll wait and see.

 

[kira setsu]

I know this type of stuff will irk poeple but it may be a good sign for the far in the future pc version of gta6...I hope.

or it could also mean that gta5 isn't raking in cash on consoles as much so they feel the need to polish up the pc version...