GTA 5 PS4, Xbox One Snapmatic Photos Look Stunning

Rockstar Games seem to really take their efforts for community interaction quite serious. For Grand Theft Auto V we've seen Rockstar step up their social media game and community engagement. One of the ways Rockstar has managed to keep gamers engaged is by spotlighting the Snapmatic photos that GTA V players have taken in-game. I must say, even without the iCEnhancer, there are some truly stunning photos that gamers managed to snap from the open-world action title.

Over on the Rockstar Social page, the company highlights some of the most noteworthy photos that gamers snapped, and it ranges from outdoor nature pics to object-oriented close-ups. Check out this one shot below of a few beer bottles.

You know that photo above could almost pass for real life if the character geometry was was higher. You can see where the vertex stops on an angle instead of being smooth all the way around. In fact, I imagine with the PC version, someone could mod in some high-end models and re-snap the same photo with near photo-realistic results. The above image is still pretty slick, though. No doubt.

The one image that really took me by surprise and had me stumped for a while was this image of the greenery. Check it out below.

Why did this photo stump me so much? Because I couldn't see where any of the polygons stopped or started. It would also seem unlikely that they would have tessellated flowers... I mean, really? That's very impressive work by Rockstar. However, I finally spotted how they did it – it's flower textures with transparent blending on a flat polygon. It's brilliant really, and you'll only notice it thanks to the single-plane flower texture you can spot on the right hand side of the image. Great work, nonetheless. The high-quality texture work really hides some of those techniques quite well.

The image below is also pretty well done. I like the colors and the angle. Check it out.

You know what's funny? The one thing that gives this image away as being 3D is the one thing that most people keep saying doesn't matter: resolution. If the shadow resolution had been higher and the anti-aliasing been ratcheted up to about 8x, the above image could have seriously fooled a lot of players who took a glance. But the reflective shadows in the chrome betray the image, as you can visibly see the pixel steps. I can't wait to see how some of these images will look on PC, though.

I think this image here does a fine job of masking some of the console hardware limitations by making good use of the depth of field effect and depth-perspective blur through the fence.

Grand Theft Auto V is currently available right now for the Xbox One and PS4, along with the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. Need more info? Feel free to hit up the official website.