did rockstar know about ps5 qssr before it got announced?

Watching the extended look again and the reflections in some scenes are rough. The ray tracing samples are clearly low, and the denoiser is doing a lot of heavy lifting with not much to work with. Blurry mess on car windows and puddles in a few shots. It's not bad overall but you can see the console limits.

Sony's QSSR thing keeps popping up in reviews for Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei. People say it cleans up the image noticeably with basically no performance hit. That's the part that gets me. If Rockstar had access to this tech early, why wouldn't they use it? Or did Sony just drop it on them a few months before launch and say "hey, maybe support this"?

The timing feels weird. QSSR was announced publicly not that long ago, and GTA 6 is out in November. Rockstar has been in crunch for ages. I can't imagine they'd bolt on a new upscaling solution this late unless it was already baked in from the start. But then why do the extended look shots show such low sample counts? Unless they captured that footage on an older build without QSSR enabled.

If QSSR really does what those reviews claim, the PS5 version could end up looking noticeably sharper than Series X. Microsoft has their own stuff but nothing that's been hyped like this. Rockstar usually aims for parity between consoles though. GTA 5 was basically identical on PS4 and Xbox One. Would they really let one platform get a visual edge this time?

I keep going back and forth. Part of me thinks Rockstar knew about QSSR years ago under NDA and built RAGE around it. Another part thinks Sony just showed up late and Rockstar said "fine, we'll toggle it on if it's free." The extended look might not even reflect final code. We've seen that before with Rockstar trailers.

What do you all think, did Sony give Rockstar a heads up way early or is this a last minute addition?

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Source: r/GTA6 · Curated content.