Kicking off, perhaps the most obvious improvement concerns the sheer wealth of life added to the game. Traffic count is hugely increased and there are a wealth of NPCs compared to last-gen, transforming the city environments. More natural elements receive a significant overhaul as well: water looks more realistic, trees are almost entirely redrawn giving them a much fuller appearance while huge fields of grass have been added where once there were none. What's impressive about this is that all of this foliage now appears to react more realistically to objects and characters passing through. On top of that, Rockstar has also sought to increase the realism by introducing new wildlife, with the trailer giving the impression of richly populated environments outside of the cityscape - a new 'rural' class of NPC, if you like.
On a more technical level, a common element we see throughout every scene in the teaser trailer is upgraded texture work, where we see a huge bump in quality. Signs, building facades, roads, mountains, vehicles, tree trunks and more all appear to feature higher-resolution artwork. More importantly, texture detail appears to be retained at a much greater distance now, with increased draw distances evident on shots that stretch out into the difference.
It's difficult to tell based on this trailer alone but it does appear that at least mild anisotropic filtering is in use this time - a welcome upgrade as this element of the visual presentation was rather lacking on last-gen consoles. The bottom line is that all of these elements combine to create richer texture detail throughout the scenes we see here - in short, Rockstar hasn't just upgraded to 1080p resolution, it has also tried to make the most of the additional pixel-count.
Impressively, despite the increase in quality, higher levels of detail appear to be retained much further into the distance. How far it extends remains to be seen, but there is a definite improvement here. Vehicles and fully detailed objects appear visible at a great distance without a visible loss in definition. GTA 4 on the PC featured a similar set of sliders, allowing you to push out the view distance as far as you'd like at the expense of performance. It should prove interesting to see just how far Rockstar has taken things and what sort of options are available on PC.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-grand-theft-auto-5-trailer-ps4-tech-analysis
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