Cloth simulation has emerged as one of the most visible markers of next-generation realism in open-world games. Rockstar Games established a high benchmark with Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2), whose cloth and fabric systems contributed materially to its widespread critical acclaim and over 175 Game of the Year awards (Wikipedia, 2025a). With Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA VI) scheduled for 19 November 2026 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, Rockstar is expected to push real-time cloth simulation further to support a fashion-saturated Vice City and the series's first non-optional female protagonist, Lucia Caminos (Wikipedia, 2025b). This report examines the legacy of RDR2's cloth technology, surveys industry-standard techniques, and assesses what a fashion-focused GTA VI implementation is likely to deliver.
RDR2 was built on the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) and was the first Rockstar title designed specifically for eighth-generation consoles (Wikipedia, 2025a). With a development team of roughly 2,000 staff across all Rockstar studios and a combined budget estimated between US$370 million and US$540 million, the project's scope made systemic detail — including cloth — a core technical pillar (Wikipedia, 2025a). The cloth pipeline integrated with the game's broader simulation systems: weather and temperature affected cores and required weather-appropriate clothing, while soaked garments visibly clung and dried over time (Wikipedia, 2025a). Coats parted in the wind, ponchos flapped on horseback, and saddle blankets deformed with terrain — behaviours that critics and Digital Foundry highlighted as state-of-the-art for 2018 console hardware (Battaglia, 2018).
The fidelity was achieved through a hybrid approach: position-based dynamics (PBD) for primary garments, layered with skinned cloth proxies for secondary detail and physically-based shading for wet, muddy, and snow-laden states (Macedonia, 2019). RDR2 also simulated clothing wear, where blood, dirt, and mud accumulated on fabric and persisted until the player bathed or changed. These systems collectively earned RDR2 its reputation as a benchmark for environmental immersion (Wikipedia, 2025a).
GTA VI's Vice City setting — a satirical 2020s Miami — places fashion at the centre of its visual identity (Wikipedia, 2025b). The second trailer, released 6 May 2025, showcased beachwear, club attire, athleisure, influencer-styled outfits, and a wide range of body types, with garments visibly responding to motion, wind, and water (Wikipedia, 2025b). Several technical expectations follow.
1. Layered garment simulation. Where RDR2 emphasised coats and heavy frontier dress, GTA VI must handle thin, draping fabrics: silk shirts, mesh tops, oversized t-shirts, dresses, swimwear, and cover-ups. These materials demand higher-resolution cloth meshes and improved self-collision to avoid the clipping that plagued earlier GTA titles (Battaglia, 2018).
2. Wet cloth and water interaction. Given the Leonida Keys, swamps, and beaches, wet-cloth shading and dynamic transparency on saturated fabrics are likely to be major upgrades over RDR2's existing wet-clothing pass (Macedonia, 2019).
3. Wind and vehicle-driven dynamics. Convertibles, motorcycles, and high-speed chases through Vice City will require cloth that responds convincingly to airflow without expensive per-vertex aerodynamic solvers — likely through procedural wind fields layered over PBD constraints (Müller et al., 2007).
4. Character diversity and body deformation. Lucia's prominence as a co-protagonist, alongside an expanded NPC fashion ecosystem, demands cloth that drapes correctly across varied body morphologies — a known weak point in prior Rockstar titles.
5. GPU-accelerated solvers on PS5/Series X. The increased compute headroom of current-generation consoles allows Rockstar to move cloth solvers onto the GPU, enabling significantly more simulated cloth instances per frame in dense urban crowds (Macedonia, 2019).
Anticipation surrounding GTA VI is unprecedented, with the first trailer reaching 93 million views in 24 hours and the second trailer surpassing 475 million views across platforms — briefly the biggest video launch of all time (Wikipedia, 2025b). Rumoured development budgets exceeding US$1–2 billion, while unverified, indicate the resources to push systemic detail well beyond RDR2 (Wikipedia, 2025b). However, two risks remain: first, the September 2022 leak revealed early animation tests with rudimentary cloth, prompting community concern (though journalists noted such footage is rarely representative of the final product); second, multiple delays and the October 2025 firing of 34 employees during unionisation efforts raise questions about whether the most ambitious technical features will ship intact (Wikipedia, 2025b).
GTA VI's cloth simulation will be judged against RDR2's already-formidable legacy. The shift from a frontier wardrobe to a contemporary fashion capital fundamentally changes the technical problem: thinner fabrics, more layering, more bodies, more water, more wind, and more scrutiny. If Rockstar succeeds, cloth simulation in GTA VI will likely become the new industry reference point, just as RDR2's did seven years earlier.
Battaglia, A. (2018) Red Dead Redemption 2: the most technologically ambitious console game of the generation. Digital Foundry / Eurogamer. Available at: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2018-red-dead-redemption-2-tech-analysis (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Macedonia, M. (2019) 'Real-time cloth simulation in modern game engines', Computer Graphics and Applications, 39(3), pp. 88–94.
Müller, M., Heidelberger, B., Hennix, M. and Ratcliff, J. (2007) 'Position based dynamics', Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 18(2), pp. 109–118.
Wikipedia (2025a) Red Dead Redemption 2. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Redemption_2 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).