GTA 6 Driving: More Realistic Like GTA IV?

Will GTA VI drive like GTA IV, that beast of weight and inertia adored by purists, or like GTA V and its nervy arcade tuned for a mass audience? The question has been stirring fans since the first trailer. The honest answer: nobody knows yet, because Rockstar has never shown a single second of driving with a controller in hand. But the two trailers do talk. Here’s what we can read into them, and what’s left to prove.

GTA IV is still the benchmark for heavy handling

For plenty of connoisseurs, the best driving Rockstar has ever produced dates back to 2008. Grand Theft Auto VI will have its work cut out to dethrone it. GTA IV runs on the in-house RAGE engine, backed by NaturalMotion’s Euphoria physics: every car has weight, body roll, a suspension that dives in corners, and a rear end that breaks loose if you push it. You feel the mass, you anticipate the braking, you correct your line. It’s demanding driving, sometimes clumsy, but with a realism that left its mark on a whole segment of players.

That design choice divides as much as it fascinates. Some hate those sedans pitching around like boats, others swear by nothing else. We already picked apart that split in our GTA 4 vs GTA 5 comparison: two opposing philosophies, one endless debate.

GTA V leaned into the arcade turn

Five years later, Rockstar changed course. In GTA V, the Euphoria physics are heavily scaled back and the driving model tilts toward arcade: cars stick to the road, turn on a dime, and forgive almost anything. More accessible, more mainstream, more immediate. That choice wasn’t purely stylistic: GTA V was born on the PS3 and Xbox 360, 2005-2006 hardware that didn’t have the compute headroom to run a simulation as heavy as GTA IV’s on a map three times the size.

The result delivered the commercial success we all know, but it left a taste of unfinished business for players who chase feel. Ever since, the question has come back with every new installment: will Rockstar dare to reconnect with the weight of old?

What Trailer 2 lets us see of GTA VI’s driving

This is where it gets interesting. Rockstar confirmed that Trailer 2 was captured entirely in-engine on a PS5, split evenly between gameplay and cinematics. In other words, what you see rolling across the screen is the engine, not a pre-rendered ad. And what you see is suspension doing work, bodies diving under braking, weight transfer in corners far closer to GTA IV than to GTA V’s smooth arcade.

A dose of caution, all the same. A trailer is edited under cinematic angles, with no HUD and not a single uncut gameplay sequence. You’re judging a render, not a feel. Until a controller gets plugged in front of us, all of this stays at the level of a clue, not proof. It’s the same reservation we hold for the rest of GTA VI’s gameplay mechanics: shown, never demonstrated.

RAGE and Euphoria, the technical DNA behind the feel

To understand why there’s room for hope, you have to look at the engine. GTA VI doesn’t start from the 2013 base: it builds on a modernized version of RAGE, in the direct lineage of Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). And RDR2 had already put Euphoria back at the center of the game, with horses, bodies, and period vehicles reacting to every impact and every dip in the terrain. It’s that technical maturity, not GTA V’s, that serves as the foundation.

Euphoria, precisely, is a procedural simulation engine: instead of replaying canned animations, it calculates how masses react in real time. On a body, that means believable falls; on a car, it means body roll, pitch, and a slide that depends on speed and grip. The more compute power climbs, the less Rockstar needs to rein in that physics to hold a steady frame rate. The PS5 and Xbox Series, with their SSD and GPU, finally offer the headroom the studio didn’t have in 2013. It’s no accident that GTA VI drops the previous-generation consoles.

The only unknown that matters remains: the feel. You can read every trailer in the world, but driving can only be judged pad in hand. Mark your calendar for November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S to settle it. In the meantime, if you want to dig into Leonida’s garage, we’ve listed the vehicles already spotted in GTA VI and detailed the technical leap over GTA 5.