Grand Theft Auto 6 will run at only 30 FPS on consoles at launch, no performance mode promised — even the souped-up PS5 Pro might not get 60 FPS support
No details on resolution either.
It's almost hard to believe that Grand Theft Auto VI is finally almost here after years of waiting. Even more surreal was seeing the first official gameplay reveal happen only three months before launch, which came with an inevitable update: GTA 6 will be locked to 30 FPS. YouTuber Davy Jones was invited by Rockstar North for a three-hour gameplay showcase where leadership confirmed the game does not target 60 FPS at launch.
Head of Development at Rockstar North, Rob Nelson, played the game for 2+ hours in front of Jones, who then detailed the experience on his Flow Games podcast. He said he could see the game running at 30 FPS during the demonstration, so he inquired about performance modes. Nelson replied that the game runs at 30 FPS for now, and that he'd need to "consult the technical team" for whether we'll see 60 FPS at launch "or later."
This has been the standard for Rockstar games for more than a decade at this point — release the game with a 30 FPS target in mind and update it later with a 60 FPS patch on more performant hardware. GTA V runs at 30 FPS on both the PS3 and PS4, but got updated to run at 60 FPS on the PS5. Red Dead Redemption 2 is unfortunately still stuck at 60 FPS on even current-gen consoles, however.
Following that track record, we likely won't see 60 FPS support on consoles till the PS7, while PC will enjoy unlocked frame rates once its port drops down the line. Digital Foundry expounded upon the 30 FPS limitation, theorizing that the high NPC density, dynamic weather, physics simulation, and advanced traffic AI will be too much for a console's CPU to handle. The GPU is not the bottleneck, because otherwise the PS5 Pro wouldn't have an issue pushing 60 FPS.
Nelson didn't confirm anything about performance modes either, which gives further credence to the PS5 Pro assumption. Rockstar also remained tight-lipped about what resolution we can expect across the different consoles; Digital Foundry says yesterday's presentation ran at upscaled 4K (from 1440p). The Xbox Series S is considerably slower than the base PS5 and Xbox Series X, while the PS5 Pro packs a lot more grunt, along with PSSR 2 for upscaling.
The same goes for other details like ray tracing, though it's widely speculated that GTA VI is relying on ray-traced reflections and lighting, which will likely improve in quality on the PS5 Pro, implying that Rockstar is prioritizing graphics over raw framerates. The gameplay released yesterday was captured on the base PS5. While the visual fidelity was on-point, keen-eyed viewers were able to notice the intense motion blur used in some scenes.
The car chase with the police particularly stands out because the fast-moving gameplay had visible smears and subtle streaking across different elements while the interwoven cutscenes did not. It seems like motion blur will be required to make the game feel smoother than it really is; besides, it can't be turned off on consoles anyway. Perhaps a 40 FPS mode could serve as a middle-ground tradeoff for 120 Hz VRR displays.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
-
yngndrw Is this the real reason for the delay on the PC release? To make the console performance appear better - or less worse.Reply -
usertests It's not clear to me that the PS6 CPU is much more than 100% faster than the PS5 CPU. Because it could have around 7-8 CPU cores, Zen 6c, conservatively clocked but probably faster than before (3.5 GHz max in PS5, 3.85 GHz max in PS5 Pro). But they won't have to reserve any of those cores if 2-core Zen 6 LP is handling the OS.Reply
What is the IPC gain between Zen 2 and Zen 6? Probably somewhere between +60% and +80%. But some niceties like AVX-512 support should make it in, and help developers that can utilize them.
Then, there will be a PS6 handheld, perhaps with only 4-core Zen 6C for the games, at lower clocks.
The point is that it will be easy for PC gamers to keep up with the 10th Generation of consoles. And CPU-bound games that are running at 30-40 FPS on the PS5 are going to get bumped to 60 FPS on PS6, but not much more. -
usertests Reply
Nope:Vicecrow said:The real problem of Ps5 Xbox etc is AMD Radeon.
Digital Foundry expounded upon the 30 FPS limitation, theorizing that the high NPC density, dynamic weather, physics simulation, and advanced traffic AI will be too much for a console's CPU to handle. The GPU is not the bottleneck, because otherwise the PS5 Pro wouldn't have an issue pushing 60 FPS.
-
timsSOFTWARE Replyyngndrw said:Is this the real reason for the delay on the PC release? To make the console performance appear better - or less worse.
Usually the reason for delaying the PC launch is piracy. There's some piracy on consoles, but a lot less than PC.
A game as big as GTA6 will have a big target on its back for crackers, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a cracked version released within hours of the binaries becoming available for PC. It's an inevitable thing they'll have to deal with when they launch on PC, but delaying it protects console sales during the initial release window. -
timsSOFTWARE Replyusertests said:Nope: Digital Foundry expounded upon the 30 FPS limitation, theorizing that the high NPC density, dynamic weather, physics simulation, and advanced traffic AI will be too much for a console's CPU to handle. The GPU is not the bottleneck, because otherwise the PS5 Pro wouldn't have an issue pushing 60 FPS.
That's a possibility, but it's not the only one.
If they are framelocked at 30, it's also possible that the game was built for that framerate specifically and some things don't currently work properly/maintain the same feel at 60 - say, vehicle physics, etc.
If that were the case, I expect they'd likely fix those issues before the PC launch - where 60+ FPS is expected - and maybe release a 60FPS patch for the Pro, if the GPU can handle it. -
Tanakoi Reply
This seems to be a highly questionable guess. Traffic AI and NPC movement are very nearly O(1) on frame rate, and physics would only be O( n ) if they failed to decouple the physics engine from the rendering loop, which I highly doubt.usertests said:Nope:Digital Foundry expounded upon the 30 FPS limitation, theorizing that the high NPC density, dynamic weather, physics simulation, and advanced traffic AI will be too much for a console's CPU to handle.
Edit: it took only a brief search to confirm my suspicions:
"...the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) uses a decoupled architecture where the physics and simulation loops are separated from the variable rendering framerate..." -
salgado18 Reply
I don't think any game being made since the PS4 locks game loop to gameplay. It's so easy and more reliable to use timers, and alleviates a huge future problem that is to increase FPS.timsSOFTWARE said:That's a possibility, but it's not the only one.
If they are framelocked at 30, it's also possible that the game was built for that framerate specifically and some things don't currently work properly/maintain the same feel at 60 - say, vehicle physics, etc.
If that were the case, I expect they'd likely fix those issues before the PC launch - where 60+ FPS is expected - and maybe release a 60FPS patch for the Pro, if the GPU can handle it.
It's frame locked to 30 because it can't reach 60 consistently in current consoles. They probably target stability and content before optimization, because it's easier to work on after launch. -
TerryLaze Reply
You still only can use one core for traffic AI (otherwise you would have groups of "thing" (pedestrian,cars etc) moving without any relation to any other group.Tanakoi said:This seems to be a highly questionable guess. Traffic AI and NPC movement are very nearly O(1) on frame rate, and physics would only be O( n ) if they failed to decouple the physics engine from the rendering loop, which I highly doubt.
Edit: it took only a brief search to confirm my suspicions:
"...the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) uses a decoupled architecture where the physics and simulation loops are separated from the variable rendering framerate..."
Same for any other of the simulation things.
So whatever one core can handle is the FPS you can get, if it can handle around and above 30 but not consistently very close to 60 then they cut it to 30 for smoothness. -
Tanakoi Reply
You fail to understand the point. Whatever that one core can handle is independent of frame rate. Your "advanced traffic AI" requires the same amount of horsepower to operate, regardless of whether the vehicles whose routes are being calculated are rendered 30 times a second, or 60 or 90. Collision detection isn't done on a per-frame basis, but per unit-time, or per unit-move delta. That's what is meant by a decoupled loop.TerryLaze said:You still only can use one core for traffic AI ... So whatever one core can handle is the FPS you can get, if it can handle around and above 30 but not consistently very close to 60 then they cut it to 30 for smoothness.