GTA 6 Was Never Going to Hit 60 Frames per Second on Consoles

Back when Rockstar showed off a bunch of GTA 6 gameplay on Netflix, one thing was incredibly clear: The game was running around 30fps. And now that Rockstar has confirmed that it is targeting 30fps on every console, including the PS5 Pro, it's clear that the game likely never would have run at a solid 60 on console.

In a blog post today, Rockstar finally shared some performance information, saying it was targeting 30fps on every console, with the PS5 Pro instead getting some extra ray tracing and PSSR to make it look better. While I'm sure there are plenty of people who would rather that effort go into a 'performance mode' that runs a bit faster, it might not have even been possible.

The biggest difference between all of the different levels of consoles, the Xbox Series S, the base PS5 and Xbox Series S, and the PS5 Pro is the strength of the GPU. That's why the PS5 Pro is getting ray tracing effects that the other consoles aren't. But, with an open world game like GTA 6, the limiting factor is probably the CPU.

Rockstar has already gone on record saying that the map in GTA 6 is bigger than any other game from the developer, and that, specifically, it's going to be densely populated. When we interviewed Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North, he told us the team was "doing everything we possibly can to create the largest, deepest, most densely populated and complex world we have ever built for people to get lost in." And no matter how much trickery you can pull with a GPU, simulating an entire city full of NPCs is going to tax the CPU.

Just watching the Netflix extended trailer, and there are a lot of people in every scene, each of which needs to be simulated by the CPU. But, due to the nature of GTA, it's more than just individual scenes having a lot of people wandering around. This is an open world game, where you can get in a car and traverse the entire map at high speeds. The game needs to be able to account for this and load in new actors dynamically, and there's only so much you can do with an 8-core Zen 2 CPU at a 3.85GHz boost clock.

Remember, too, that on every current-gen console, the CPU and GPU share a unified memory pool. That really matters in a game like GTA 6 because that memory has to handle both simulation data like NPCs and detailed weather events, along with graphics data like textures, lighting and character meshes. No one outside of Rockstar has seen the performance metrics for this game, but I wouldn't be surprised if the game is running up against its limits on all four of the consoles.

As it stands, the only way you're going to be able to play this game at 60fps is to either wait for the PC version or the inevitable PS6 and Project Helix ports. But, I think even most gaming PCs are going to struggle to get a solid 60fps in this game.

If you look at the most recent Steam Hardware Survey, most people are on CPUs with 8-cores or less, which could run into some of the same limits as the console versions. The difference, though, is that most PCs have dedicated RAM and VRAM for their CPU and GPU, respectively, so there should be less of a bottleneck – especially if you're on a speedy X3D processor with all of that speedy cache available. At least it looks like I probably don't have to wait too long to see how GTA 6 is going to run on PC.

Only time will tell just how well GTA 6 is going to run on these consoles, and hopefully it stays locked at a solid 30fps most of the time. Rockstar probably chose its words very carefully when it said it was 'targeting' 30fps in its blog, so I'm very curious at how well the Xbox Series S is going to hold up. Now that we're just 9 days out from GTA 6's November 19 release date, we won't have to wait long to find out.