After years of waiting, Rockstar says it's finally going to bring the PC version of Grand Theft Auto Online to parity with the "enhanced" edition that's been available for consoles for the past two years.
GTA Online came to Xbox Series X-S and PlayStation 5 in March 2022 with a variety of "technical and graphical improvements." That version of the game has received several exclusive upgrades since, including ray tracing and the GTA+ subscription service, which offers players a range of monthly cash and content drops—all of it unavailable on PC. As we said last year, it felt like PC players were being left in the dust because... well, we were.
The first real sign that PC players might finally be brought up to speed came to light in September when Rockstar integrated BattlEye anticheat into GTA Online. Adding BattlEye to the game after almost a decade of operation seemed a little odd, but Rockstar Games follower Tez2 speculated at the time that it "could be seen as preparations for the arrival of the Gen9 version [of Grand Theft Auto 5] on PC."
It turns out he was correct. In an update posted today, ostensibly about the new content coming to GTA Online in December—a takeover of the Darnell Bros Garment Factory, new Dispatch Work missions, Job Creator updates, community challenges, that sort of thing—Rockstar said it "plans to bring the much-requested PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S features of GTA Online to the PC platform in the new year."
That's the extent of it, aside from the usual exhortation to "stay tuned," so details on what PC players can look forward to aren't yet nailed down, and that's sparked some consternation on Reddit. Some players are concerned that the graphical enhancements will negatively impact performance on older PCs (remember, GTA Online is more than 10 years old, so it's undoubtedly being run on some aged rigs), while others expect Rockstar will dodge that issue by only adding the enhanced-exclusive content and excluding visual upgrades like ray tracing—which is less of an issue given the number of mods that already make GTA Online look awfully pretty than the stock release.
There's also the question of whether the enhanced edition on PC will carry a price tag or be a free upgrade. I've reached out to Rockstar to see if we can squeeze any more info out of them on that front, although given how secretive the studio typically is about this stuff, I'm not too hopeful.
All of this is happening in the shadow of Grand Theft Auto 6, which is slated to launch on consoles sometime in 2025 (although we have doubts about that) and still hasn't been confirmed for PC. It will come to PC eventually, of that we are quite confident, but the time frame is the big question: It took seven months for Grand Theft Auto 4 to jump from consoles to PC, and a year and a half for GTA 5 to make the move. Red Dead Redemption? 14 and a half years. Hopefully GTA 6 will be a little quicker than that.
