One detail has caught fans' attention: a Ferris wheel on the far side of the bay casts no reflection in the water, while surrounding geometry appears mirrored. Prior GTA 6 trailers already established ray traced reflections, and this shot appears to use a hybrid mix of ray tracing and screen space reflections across the bay.
Ray traced water here mirrors nearby building meshes without matching their lighting or shading, and reflected surfaces look brighter than the source objects. Ray tracing can be configured in multiple ways to save on GPU performance, and the RAGE engine will have its own unique ray tracing setup. Ray tracing can also exclude specific geometry from its pass through a Bounding Volume Hierarchy setup, which may explain why the Ferris wheel sits in similar range to reflected buildings yet shows no mirror image. Neither ray tracing nor the SSR fallback appears configured to reflect that Ferris wheel in this clip.
The footage still shows ray tracing benefits: no obvious water occlusion artifacts, stable reflections as skyscrapers frame the shot, and helicopters passing in front of buildings without breaking the mirror image. SSR fills edge gaps where ray tracing does not reach, though it does not extend to geometry like the Ferris wheel. Camera distance may also factor into what gets reflected, and that cannot be controlled in this brief 10 second clip. The missing Ferris wheel reflection likely reflects a ray tracing quirk that could be adjusted before launch. Grand Theft Auto 6 pre orders begin June 25, and the cover art has been revealed.
