Luke Ross is back on Grand Theft Auto V. On October 15 he posted Release 2610.15.2 of his R.E.A.L. VR framework to Patreon early access, adding GTA V Enhanced. He titled it "It's not a comeback... it's a return." Ross calls GTA V the game "where it all started." In 2022, a Take-Two DMCA notice pushed him off it.
I haven't played it. This is based on Ross's public Patreon post, his GitHub repo, press coverage and two players' videos.
Ray tracing, DLSS and AER v2
The build targets the Enhanced edition and runs on the same game-agnostic runtime Ross uses for his other games. His post lists "full ray tracing," DLSS for stereoscopic supersampling and his AER v2 motion smoothing. He says AER v2 fixes the judder his old version showed in fast cars and helicopters. His headline claim: "everything works here." He says you can play the full game with it.
The first build wasn't perfect. In an October 16 update, Ross wrote that a last-minute change to cutscene detection meant "I broke shooting from vehicles." Release 2610.16.2 fixes it.
In NotAGameAddict's capture, the performance overlay reads 72 fps and 59 ms latency on a Quest 3 streaming over 5 GHz Wi-Fi from an RTX 4080 Super.
Hands stay on the pad
Controls stay on keyboard, mouse or gamepad. The headset only handles the view. Ross admits AI has shrunk the work of adding motion controls to "AI-minutes and AI-hours" of effort. He still isn't adding them, saying none of the vibe-coded conversions he tried was playable from start to finish. He argues that none of today's AI-built VR mods implement motion controllers properly, "the way they would work in a title which had been designed for VR."
Runtime, not mod
Ross's original GTA V mod is still on GitHub, frozen at Release 7 from December 2020. A July 8, 2022 note blames Take-Two's "hostile behavior" for ending a mod with "almost 200,000 downloads." Road to VR reported that the notice went to Patreon, then on to Ross. It covered his GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Mafia mods, and he pulled all three.
This time Ross argues his software is "a runtime, a conversion layer sitting between the game itself and the VR headset," not a game-specific mod. He has also dropped the games' promotional material. "I no longer even use the official game names in the announcements of new versions of my runtime," he wrote. IP experts and lawyers he consulted think a new claim would most likely be in bad faith. He also concedes "there are no guarantees." We found no public response from Take-Two.
Ross's post makes this an early-access release only, so the open questions are whether GTA V support reaches his public builds and whether Take-Two responds.
