Grand Theft Auto 5 will receive a free upgrade on PC next month, which will bring a series of technical enhancements and GTA Online features that were previously only available on the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X versions of the game. In addition to improved graphics quality and online-specific content, the upgrade also brings GTA+ membership to PC players. All players who own the PC version of GTA 5 will receive a free upgrade on March 4th.
GTA 5 PC version free upgrade
Developer Rockstar Games detailed the PC upgrade in a blog post on Thursday. With the upgrade, the PC version of GTA 5 will finally get PC-specific ray tracing features such as ambient occlusion and global illumination. Additionally, the upgrade will add support for ray-traced shadows and reflections, which first appeared on current-gen consoles. Players who upgrade to the new version will also be able to migrate story mode and online progress from previous versions.
The PC version of GTA 5 will eventually also gain support for AI upgrade technologies such as AMD FSR1 and FSR3, as well as NVIDIA DLSS 3. Other technical enhancements in the game include faster load times on SSD and DirectStorage; enhanced support for higher resolutions, aspect ratios, and frame rates; support for adaptive triggers on the DualSense controller; and enhanced audio with support for Dolby Atmos and increased fidelity for speech, movies, and music.
Rockstar recommends at least 8GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7-4770 or AMD FX-9590 processor, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1630 or AMD Radeon RX 6400 GPU (with 4GB VRAM) to play the upgraded version of the game on PC.
This upgrade will add new cars and vehicle upgrades to Hao’s special engineering
Image source: Rockstar Games
GTA Online features
The free upgrade will also add GTA Online functionality, which is currently only available on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. These include new cars and vehicle upgrades at the Hao Special Factory, environmental animal encounters in Southern San Andreas, career progression features in GTA Online, a refreshed landing page, and an improved GTA $4,000,000 introductory cash bonus for new players.
Improvements to the GTA Online player experience as part of the upgrade also include core-based anti-cheat protection and proactive voice chat moderation.
Finally, the upgrade also brings GTA+ membership to PC players, who can sign up for the service to enjoy special benefits such as 500,000 GTA$ per month (delivered at the time of billing), a members-only Shark Card with a 15% GTA$ bonus, a selection of classic Rockstar Games games to download and play in the GTA+ game library, and more.
Rockstar says it will continue to support older versions of GTA 5 on PC so that players who don’t have the hardware that meets the minimum requirements for the new upgrade can continue to play the game. The developers say that support for FiveM mods will also continue and will be expanded to upgraded versions at some point. However, players of the previous version will not be able to play online with players of the upgraded version.