Volumetric effects represent one of the most computationally demanding yet visually transformative categories of real-time rendering, encompassing the simulation of light scattering through participating media such as fog, smoke, dust, and mist. For Grand Theft Auto VI (scheduled for release on 19 November 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S), Rockstar Games is expected to deploy a next-generation volumetrics pipeline that builds substantially upon the systems developed for Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA V. Given the game's setting in the fictional state of Leonida — a humid, sub-tropical region modelled on Florida featuring everglade swamps, coastal mist, urban smog, and atmospheric weather systems — volumetric rendering will be a primary contributor to the game's signature visual identity (Rockstar Games, 2026).
This report analyses the technical foundations of volumetric rendering, surveys prior-art implementations in AAA titles, and projects the volumetric feature set GTA VI is likely to expose, drawing on publicly available trailer footage, industry technical literature, and prior engine behaviour in RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine).
Volumetric lighting, colloquially referred to as "God rays" or crepuscular rays, is a technique used in 3D computer graphics to simulate the interaction of light with three-dimensional participating media. Rather than treating light as something that only strikes surfaces, volumetric techniques model the light cone emitted by a source as a transparent volume that contains an aerosol — fog, dust, smoke, or steam — through which photons scatter, absorb, and transmit before reaching the camera (Wikipedia, 2026).
The canonical real-time implementation requires two components: a light-space shadow map and a depth buffer. Starting at the near clip plane, the renderer marches rays through the view frustum, accumulating sampled in-scattering values into a buffer. For each sample the shadow map determines whether that point in space is lit; only lit samples contribute to the final pixel colour (Wikipedia, 2026). Modern engines have largely replaced naive ray-marching with froxel-based volumetric rendering, in which the view frustum is voxelised into a 3D texture (typically 160x90x64 or 240x135x128 froxels), and density, scattering, and extinction are integrated front-to-back per froxel before being composited with opaque geometry (Hillaire, 2015).
NVIDIA's Volumetric Lighting SDK formalised a physically-based light-scattering model for DirectX shaders, supporting directional, omni, and spot lights. The system computes single-scattering Mie and Rayleigh phase functions through extruded shadow volumes derived from shadow-map data, allowing dramatic light shafts whose intensity is tunable to balance quality against performance across a range of GPU capabilities (NVIDIA, n.d.). Although the SDK itself is now legacy, its physical model — the Henyey-Greenstein phase function, anisotropic scattering, and density-driven extinction — remains the foundation of most modern AAA volumetric pipelines, including Frostbite, Decima, and (by extension) Rockstar's RAGE.
Volumetric fog is the workhorse of the category: a uniform or noise-perturbed density field that fills the world and modulates light transport across all distances. Unlike legacy "distance fog" (a simple per-pixel colour blend), volumetric fog responds to local light sources — neon signs, headlights, muzzle flashes — producing in-scattering halos and shafts that reveal the shape of the air itself. In GTA VI's Vice City, volumetric fog will be critical to selling humid dawns, oceanic haze, and the diffuse glow of Art Deco neon at night.
Smoke is typically rendered as a hybrid of GPU-particle systems and volumetric density injection. High-frequency turbulent detail is generated through curl-noise advection or baked Houdini Vector-Database (VDB) volumes, then injected into the same froxel grid that handles fog. This unification allows light shafts to penetrate smoke columns convincingly — a feature visible in RDR2's gunfights and campfire scenes (Carre et al., 2019).
Dust shares the smoke pipeline but operates at lower density and finer granularity. It is most visible in shafts of sunlight through interiors, behind vehicles travelling on dirt roads, and in demolition or combat dust kicked up by impacts. GTA VI's trailer footage already shows substantial dust interaction during a sand-mining sequence and along unpaved Leonida back-roads (Rockstar Games, 2026).
Mist — fine water aerosol — overlaps with fog but is typically anchored to specific gameplay events: waterfalls, breaking surf, wet roads after rain, and the cool exhalations seen in cold-morning car interiors. Leonida's everglades, mangroves, and beaches make mist a near-constant background presence in the expected weather cycle.
Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) is the most direct technical antecedent to GTA VI's volumetrics. RDR2 deployed a full froxel-based volumetric fog stage integrated with the engine's time-of-day, weather, and shadow systems, supporting up to thousands of shadow-casting local lights contributing in-scattering (Carre et al., 2019). Snow blizzards, swamp mist, gunfight smoke, and crepuscular rays through forest canopies were all unified in a single volumetric path, with temporal reprojection used to amortise sampling cost across frames.
GTA V (2013), running on the prior RAGE generation, used a simpler approach — screen-space god rays via radial blur from the sun, combined with billboarded smoke particles and post-process fog. The leap from GTA V's approach to RDR2's froxel system represents the magnitude of upgrade GTA VI is expected to provide over RDR2 itself.
Based on trailer footage, platform capabilities, and Rockstar's engineering trajectory, the following features are anticipated:
Performance will likely be balanced via temporal reprojection, checkerboard froxel updates, and machine-learning-based denoising (DLSS/FSR/PSSR), with quality presets exposing froxel resolution and ray-march step counts to players on PC at launch (presumed 2027).
Volumetric effects in GTA VI will represent a generational step over RDR2, themselves already a category leader. The combination of Leonida's atmospherically rich setting, current-generation console hardware, and Rockstar's eight-year R&D cycle since RDR2 positions GTA VI to set a new bar for real-time participating-media rendering. Fog, smoke, dust, and mist are not decorative additions but integral to the simulation of place — and Vice City's identity has always been inseparable from its humid, neon-soaked air.
Carre, A., Cheng, J. and Iwanicki, M. (2019) Advances in real-time rendering: Red Dead Redemption 2. SIGGRAPH Course Notes. New York: ACM.
Hillaire, S. (2015) Physically based and unified volumetric rendering in Frostbite. SIGGRAPH Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games. New York: ACM. Available at: https://www.ea.com/frostbite/news/physically-based-unified-volumetric-rendering-in-frostbite (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
NVIDIA (n.d.) NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting. NVIDIA Developer. Available at: https://developer.nvidia.com/volumetriclighting (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Rockstar Games (2026) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com/VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026) Volumetric lighting. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volumetric_lighting (Accessed: 14 May 2026).