A technical analysis by Digital Foundry has concluded that Grand Theft Auto 6 is unlikely to offer a stable 60 frames per second mode even on the PlayStation 5 Pro, despite it being the most powerful current-generation console, with CPU limitations identified as the primary obstacle that graphics hardware improvements alone cannot resolve.
The analysis points to the game’s large open world set in Leonida, Rockstar’s version of Florida, as the central challenge. Footage from the second trailer and promotional screenshots show dense urban environments in Vice City, large crowds, detailed vehicles, and extensive simulation systems governing how the world behaves at any given moment. Players will be able to travel by land, sea, and air, with each mode of movement generating complex physics calculations that run simultaneously with all other active simulation processes. Games with similarly demanding simulation systems, including Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3, have demonstrated how processing-heavy open environments can prevent consoles from maintaining consistent frame rates in busy scenes, and Grand Theft Auto 6 appears set to be considerably more demanding than either of those titles.
The PlayStation 5 Pro’s advantage over the standard PlayStation 5 lies primarily in its improved graphics processing unit, enhanced ray-tracing hardware, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling capability. These improvements benefit rendering, image quality, and visual effects directly. However, the console’s central processing unit offers only a modest performance uplift over the base PlayStation 5, and it is the central processing unit, not the graphics processor, that handles physics calculations, world simulation, and background systems. Better graphics hardware cannot compensate for a central processing unit constraint, which is why the analysis concludes that a stable 60 frames per second target remains out of reach even with the Pro’s enhanced specification.
A 40 frames per second mode is identified as a more realistic middle ground for players using 120Hz displays, sitting between the 33.3 millisecond frame time of 30 frames per second and the 16.7 millisecond frame time of 60 frames per second. Rockstar could offer a 40 frames per second option alongside a standard 30 frames per second mode to accommodate different screen configurations, though no such modes have been confirmed. The historical pattern from Rockstar’s previous titles, including Grand Theft Auto 4, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2, all of which launched on consoles at 30 frames per second, supports the expectation that simulation and visual fidelity will again be prioritised over frame rate at launch, with higher frame rate modes potentially introduced through later updates as seen with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S patches for Grand Theft Auto 5. Rockstar has not announced any technical details or confirmed available graphics modes for Grand Theft Auto 6 ahead of its release.
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