- Digital Foundry says getting Grand Theft Auto 6 to run at 60fps on current-gen consoles is "extremely unlikely"
- The tech experts say the 30fps footage from the Extended Look was "the most impressive example of real-time game rendering" they've seen
- It says the eventual PC version running at 60fps would be "genuinely challenging"
Tech analysts have suggested that getting Grand Theft Auto 6 to run smoothly at 60 frames per second would be a massive challenge on console.
After Grand Theft Auto 6's Extended Look, which finally offered a deep dive into Rockstar's biggest game yet running on the base PS5, reports confirmed that the game will run at 30fps on PlayStation and Xbox, with the possibility of 60fps being added post-launch.
That's no surprise considering the scale and how hyper-realistic GTA 6 looks, but according to the tech experts at Digital Foundry, it may be impossible for current-gen consoles to even hit 60fps.
Speaking about last night's extended look footage, the folks at Digital Foundry said it looks like "the most impressive example of real-time game rendering" they've ever seen; the gameplay shown is "relatively stable and well-paced 30fps output, with only very occasional single frame drops (though the nature of the 30fps asset means there could be more, unseen)."
It's believed that, while 30fps might seem low for a current-gen title such as GTA 6, Rockstar appears to be targeting this level to maximize the game's level of visual detail.
"It's clear that the focus was absolutely maximizing the level of visual detail at a fixed 30fps frame rate on all platforms," Digital Foundry wrote. "The rendering, simulation and presentation have all been tuned around that constraint — and the result is an unprecedented level of density, material quality and world coherence, with trade-offs landing primarily in image quality and animation smoothness rather than systemic scale or fidelity."
It continued, "The evidence suggests that the game maintains its 33.3ms cadence with care, and Rockstar has clearly spent immense effort balancing CPU and GPU workloads to fully saturate the hardware."
For this reason, Digital Foundry believes "a 60fps version extremely unlikely on console hardware — there's no way to regain enough GPU and particularly CPU time to make a 16.7ms update rate work without compromising the world."
It also suggests that the game could look better on PS5 Pro, thanks to the console's powerful GPU with PSSR upscaling, but Rockstar has yet to reveal official gameplay running on the hardware.
As for the eventual PC release, which hasn't been announced yet, "some level of caution is required" as while the platform could allow higher resolutions and benefit from upscalers like Nvidia DLSS, the CPU demand of GTA 6's complex world could "make hitting 60fps genuinely challenging in a way we don't often see, and will likely require a high-end CPU like a recent Ryzen X3D to avoid bottlenecks."
GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PS5, Xbox Series X, and Series S, and Rockstar has confirmed that the game can take up to 80 hours to beat.
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