3 years later, GTA 5’s Enhanced edition finally comes to PC, and it’s somehow 22GB smaller than GTA 5 Cool Original flavour

GTA 6 is somewhere, dimly, on the horizon, but Rockstar must be a bit worried it's forgotten how to release a Grand Theft Auto game in the last 12 years (maybe with good reason). To get some practice in, the studio is finally releasing GTA 5's next-gen update on PC next week on Tuesday, March 4.

This is the update that has, for the last three years, been strictly console-exclusive, and contains a whole bunch of up-dazzles and modernisations for the venerable old carjacking sim. That means stuff like raytracing, DirectStorage, DLSS 3 (plus FSR1 and FSR3) and all sorts of other graphical and gameplay treats. The good news? You can actually preload it on Steam right now, presuming you already own GTA 5 Cool Original.

Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced has its own Steam page, cunningly obscured from regular Steam search, but you probably don't actually need it. If you're a GTA 5 owner, you'll find that the original version of the game has been renamed Grand Theft Auto 5 Legacy in your Steam library, and there's a whole new entry called Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced, which you can download ahead of its release next week.

Another surprise: the Enhanced version of the game is actually smaller than the original, unless Steam is lying to me. Where GTA 5 Legacy says it wants 114GB of your hard drive, GTA 5 Enhanced only lays claim to a slender 92GB. That's a 22GB saving! You could install KOTOR 1 seven times over in the space you've freed up, there.

If you're wanting to carry over progress—either online or in-story—over to GTA 5 Enhanced, there's another hurdle to leap. Once you've got the Enhanced version preloaded, boot up original GTA 5 and you'll be able to transfer over your save on the pause screen. GTA Online transfers require a bit of a wait, though—you'll only be able to do those once GTA 5 Enhanced actually comes out.

The good news is it's a full transfer: you'll get all your in-game gubbins and cash and, barring some kind of terrible crisis, not lose a single thing from your dragon's hoard of GTAO goodies. Plus they'll all be ray-traced now. So that's nice.