Hair simulation has emerged as one of the most demanding rendering challenges in modern AAA games, sitting at the intersection of geometry, physics, lighting and memory budgets. With Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games, 2026) targeting a Florida-inspired setting populated by a diverse cast — from beach influencers and rappers to drug runners and law enforcement — the title will need to render an extraordinarily wide spectrum of hairstyles convincingly under tropical lighting conditions. This report synthesises evidence from Rockstar's prior work on Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), the broader real-time hair rendering literature, and the leaked and officially revealed material for GTA VI to estimate the likely technical approach used by the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE).
Real-time hair rendering has historically relied on two competing paradigms: card-based (shell/strip) hair and strand-based hair. Card-based systems, in which clumps of hair are represented as flat textured polygons, dominated the seventh and early eighth console generations because of their low memory and shading cost (Yuksel and Tariq, 2010). Strand-based systems, popularised by NVIDIA's HairWorks and AMD's TressFX middleware around 2013–2014, simulate hair as thousands of individual tessellated splines with per-strand physics and the Marschner shading model for anisotropic specular highlights (Marschner et al., 2003). The latter approach delivers vastly superior silhouettes and motion but historically cost several milliseconds per character per frame — prohibitive in open-world contexts containing dozens of NPCs.
Modern hybrid pipelines, exemplified by The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020) and Hellblade II: Senua's Saga (Ninja Theory, 2024), combine hero-character strand hair with card-based hair for background NPCs, switching LODs based on screen-space size. PS5 and Xbox Series X hardware, with their dedicated mesh-shader pipelines, have made strand hair viable for a wider cast (Digital Foundry, 2024).
Red Dead Redemption 2 established Rockstar's baseline for hair simulation. The game shipped with one of the most detailed beard-and-hair systems in any open-world title, including a documented dynamic beard-growth system: Arthur Morgan's facial hair grows in real-time over in-game days, with discrete length tiers that can be trimmed at barbers or accelerated using hair tonic (Wikipedia, 2026). The game also models hairstyle changes through barber visits, with cleanliness, weight and weather affecting visual presentation (Wikipedia, 2026).
Technically, RDR2's hair is predominantly card-based, with extensive use of anisotropic shading, dithered transparency to avoid expensive order-independent transparency sorting, and per-clump wind response rather than per-strand physics. Hero characters such as Arthur and Dutch received bespoke higher-resolution hair cards, while horses and bison feature shell-rendered fur — a separate technique using stacked translucent geometry layers to approximate volumetric pelt (Digital Foundry, 2018). The beard-growth system in particular was novel: rather than swapping discrete meshes, Rockstar used a vertex-shader-driven length parameter combined with texture LUT swaps, allowing continuous-looking growth without per-frame topology changes.
The current console generation has accelerated strand-based hair adoption. Unreal Engine 5's Groom system, the open-source TressFX 4.1, and EA's "Frostbite Strand" pipeline used in FIFA and Battlefield now allow tens of thousands of individual strands per character with full self-shadowing and global illumination response (Epic Games, 2023). Crucially, GPU-driven culling and Nanite-style virtualised geometry mean strand counts can scale dynamically by screen-space coverage, making crowd-scale strand hair theoretically feasible for the first time.
For GTA VI's diverse cast — which is confirmed to include protagonists Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval alongside rappers, influencers and a wide Vice City civilian population (Wikipedia, 2026) — Rockstar will need to render a far wider range of hair types than RDR2's predominantly Caucasian and Native American cast. Type 3 and 4 textured/coily hair, dreadlocks, cornrows, weaves, braids and bleach-blonde Florida-Man styles all present distinct simulation challenges that card-based pipelines have historically rendered poorly.
Trailer 2 (Rockstar Games, 2025) and the accompanying 70-screenshot drop revealed a striking variety of hairstyles, including Lucia's slicked-back ponytail, Jason's medium-length wavy hair, characters Bae-Luxe and Roxy ("Real Dimez") sporting long braided and weave styles, and Boobie Ike and Dre'Quan Priest with cropped fades and locs. Background NPCs in beach and club scenes display bleached buzz-cuts, surfer hair, pixie cuts and elaborate updos. Rendering this variety credibly will demand:
GTA VI will almost certainly mark the most ambitious hair simulation in any open-world title to date. The combination of a culturally diverse cast, Florida's wet/humid climate, and five years of engine refinement since RDR2 suggests Rockstar will adopt a hybrid strand-and-card pipeline backed by GPU-driven LOD selection. The beard-growth system pioneered in RDR2 will likely return and expand, while textured and coily hair types — historically under-served by card-based pipelines — should benefit substantially from physically-based strand shading. Whether Rockstar licences middleware such as TressFX or extends its proprietary tooling, GTA VI's hair will be a visible technical statement and a meaningful cultural step beyond previous entries in the series.
d'Eon, E., Francois, G., Hill, M., Letteri, J. and Aubry, J.-M. (2011) 'An energy-conserving hair reflectance model', Computer Graphics Forum, 30(4), pp. 1181–1187.
Digital Foundry (2018) 'Red Dead Redemption 2 Tech Analysis', Eurogamer, 26 October.
Digital Foundry (2024) 'Hellblade II strand hair deep dive', Eurogamer. Available at: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Epic Games (2023) Unreal Engine 5 Groom Documentation. Available at: https://docs.unrealengine.com (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Marschner, S.R., Jensen, H.W., Cammarano, M., Worley, S. and Hanrahan, P. (2003) 'Light scattering from human hair fibers', ACM Transactions on Graphics, 22(3), pp. 780–791.
Rockstar Games (2025) Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 2. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026) 'Red Dead Redemption 2'. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Redemption_2 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026) 'Grand Theft Auto VI'. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Yuksel, C. and Tariq, S. (2010) 'Advanced techniques in real-time hair rendering and simulation', ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Courses. New York: ACM.