GTA 5 PS5 and Xbox Series X: release date, enhancements and news

GTA 5 PS5 and Xbox Series X is the planned ‘expanded and enhanced’ version of the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto 5 and GTA Online, due to release on March 15, 2022.

Arriving nearly nine years after the game’s original release, developer Rockstar Games has confirmed that GTA 5 for PS5 and Xbox Series X will feature new graphics modes, HDR options, faster load times and much more on the latest consoles (the game’s third console generation overall) when it arrives in March. 

You might wonder why the developer is even bothering making a new version at all – especially as it has just announced GTA 6 – but GTA 5 and its online multiplayer, GTA Online, are hugely successful games, so keeping the player base engaged across generations seems key.

Want to know more? Read on for everything we know about GTA 5 on PS5 and Xbox Series X, including all the enhancements that has been confirmed so far.

GTA 5 PS5 and Xbox Series X: cut to the chase

• What is it? A remastered version of GTA 5 for PS5 and Xbox Series X
• When can I play it? March15, 2022
• What can I play it on? PS5 and Xbox Series X

GTA 5 PS5 and Xbox Series X release date and platforms

Rockstar has confirmed that GTA 5 is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on March 15, 2022, with GTA Online also releasing for the consoles as a separate standalone edition. Could this be a deliberate move to reduce GTA’s storage demands, and allow the multiplayer component to do more ambitious things? Or is it simply to position GTA Online as a continuous entity, even if another numbered GTA gets announced in the next couple of years? We’ll have to wait and see.

GTA 5 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S was initially meant to release on November 11, 2021, but Rockstar Games announced the upgraded edition of the game was delayed until March 2022 in September 2021. The new release date was then confirmed, alongside the announcement of GTA 6, in February 2022.

PlayStation owners have a significant advantage in all of this. If you play GTA Online on PS4, you’ll get GTA$1 million to spend in-game every month until the PS5 version of GTA launches. And when GTA Online’s standalone edition arrives on PS5 in March 2022, owners of the console will have three months to claim the game for free after release – until June 2022. That means that Xbox Series X/S owners will have to pay if they want to play the new version of GTA Online at launch, though a price hasn’t been disclosed.

It remains unclear if GTA 5 on PS5 and Xbox Series X will offer those who own the game on PS4 and Xbox One a paid upgrade option or whether these new versions will need to be bought outright.

GTA 5 PS5 and Xbox Series X trailers

PlayStation Showcase 2021 trailer
A GTA 5 trailer was revealed during Sony’s PlayStation Showcase 2021 event. You can check it out below:

Announcement trailer
GTA 5 on PS5 was the first trailer revealed for the console during Sony’s Future of Gaming Event in June 2020. The intro, featuring Michael saying ‘Why did I move here? I guess it was the weather” parallels GTA 5’s famous first trailer in 2011. Check it out below:

GTA 5 PS5 and Xbox Series X enhancements: what are they?

Grand Theft Auto 5 and GTA Online on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S will benefit from a range of technical improvements, visual upgrades and performance enhancements to “take full advantage of the latest hardware”.

In a blog post, Rockstar Games confirmed that both titles feature “new graphics modes with up to 4K resolution, up to 60 frames per second, texture and draw distance upgrades, HDR options and ray-tracing, as well as offering the technical advancements of the latest console generation with faster loading times, immersive 3D audio, platform-specific features like advanced haptic feedback, and much more,” Rockstar has confirmed.

Another welcome feature is that players can transfer their save data from the PS4 and Xbox One to their more modern consoles, including their GTA Online characters. 

In addition, the new version of GTA Online will feature “a range of improvements”, including the ability to skip the GTA 5 Story Mode prologue before jumping into Online and a new GTA Online Tutorial (like the replace the prologue). This should make jumping into GTA Online much easier for newbies, with new GTA Online players now able to enter Career Builder, granting instant access to one of four illegal businesses: Biker, Executive, Nightclub Owner, or Gunrunner. What’s more, new players will get a chunk of in-game currency to help them get started. 

Where is GTA 6?

GTA 6 has now officially been announced by Rockstar Games. Check out our GTA 6 guide for all the juicy details we have on the next Grand Theft Auto game.

GTA 5 PS5 and Xbox Series X: news and rumors

Vehicle upgrades for Online
Rockstar has announced on Twitter that when GTA Online hits the latest consoles, “select vehicles will be upgradable” on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game, with “all-new speed improvements and more”.

“These special upgrades will be available only on PS5 and Series X/S versions of GTA 5,” the Tweet confirmed, adding, “stay tuned for more details.”

The tweet doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail, not revealing the exact nature of these upgrades. It also leaves some users with questions, specifically whether PC players will have access to these upgrades and whether or not current-gen players having faster, upgraded cars means there’ll be no cross-gen cross-play. 

Not a ‘simple port’
Speaking during the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, in March 2021 (via VGC), Take-Two’s CEO, Strauss Zelnick, explained that the company doesn’t necessarily see remasters becoming a bigger part of the company’s strategy going forward, it plans to approach any potential remasters differently from its competitors.

“Remastering has always been a part of the strategy,” Zelnik said. “We’ve done differently than the competition – we don’t just port titles over, we actually take the time to do the very best job we can making the title different for the new release, for the new technology that we’re launching it on.”

“So, we improve the technology, we upgrade the visuals, and we make performance enhancements,” Zelnik continued. “And that’s why I think our remastered titles typically do so well.”

“We’ve done great with the Mafia series, for example, and Grand Theft Auto [V] is now heading into its third generation which is incredible”, Zelnik said of the upcoming GTA 5 remaster. “It was a standard-bearer when it was launched, it continued to be the standard-bearer in the second generation, we’ll see how Grand Theft Auto does in the next generation. Obviously, I’m confident that Rockstar is going to deliver just a great experience, but you can’t do that if you’re just doing a simple port.”

Using Rockstar’s RAGE engine?
There have been rumors that the game could use Rockstar’s RAGE engine, used in the development of Red Dead Redemption 2.

The rumors come from Rockstar insider ‘Tez2’ (Via Wccftech) who posted on  GTAForums that new GTA 5 game data makes reference to the RAGE engine rather than GTA 5’s original engine. Tez2 does also note, however, that this could mean that the game’s UI will run on the new engine while the rest of the game will still use its original engine. 

Writing on the forum, Tez2 says “Found out new structs that were added with the recent update relating to the standalone version and one of them is “rage::fwuiMessageBase”, which is from RDR2’s RAGE version, so that seems to go along what @Spider-Vice & @uNi stated, that the enhanced edition is likely to utilize RDR2’s RAGE version. However, it could just be that the UI would utilize RDR2’s base code, while the rest remains the same.”

As these are just rumors at the moment, however, we should be wary until Rockstar itself makes any kind of announcement. 

We’re also still waiting for further information on how this edition is ‘expanded’ for new consoles, as the trailer mentions, but Rockstar will discuss the new version of the game more down the line.