Getting Rockstar’s hugely ambitious GTA 6 running at 60fps on current consoles will be “extremely unlikely”, the tech experts at Digital Foundry have said, after analysis of footage from the Grand Theft Auto 6: Extended Look.
Yesterday’s 27-minute reveal featured 30fps footage of the game on Netflix, YouTube, and in the raw file made available by Rockstar to download — and this is seemingly how we should all expect the game to look when it arrives on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S this November.
While 30fps might seem low compared to the frame counts of other modern gaming blockbusters, Rockstar appears to be targeting this level to maximize the sheer detail on offer in every one of those frames, Digital Foundry believes.
“It’s clear that the focus was absolutely maximising the level of visual detail at a fixed 30fps frame-rate on all platforms,” Digital Foundry wrote in an Extended Look deep dive article. “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.”
Specifically, the report goes on to heap praise on GTA 6’s character rendering, including skin shading that makes sweat and make-up look convincing, and “huge generation improvements to hair simulation” that allows Lucia’s locks to behave realistically with convincing snap-back motions, delayed follow-through and impressive “base-to-tip motion.”
In terms of resolution, Digital Foundry suspects the PS5’s internal rendering is clocked at 1440p without DRS, without any strong evidence of FSR 2 or TAA upscaling being used. This can lead to “a degree of softness, visible geometric aliasing and shimmer on fine details,” Digital Foundry wrote, but no sign of frame-rate drops that have hampered previous entries in the series at launch. While improvements for the beefier PS5 Pro are only speculative, improved image quality and ray-tracing were mooted as more likely, over any transformative boost in performance.
“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,” Digital Foundry continued. “That makes 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.”
The game is carefully balanced in terms of its ambition, then, with the downside that there’s likely little left in the tank to enable a 60fps mode down the line — at least on the current crop of consoles. But how about PC?
“Looking ahead to other console versions and the presumably-coming-eventually PC release, some level of caution is required,” Digital Foundry wrote. “The PC platform ought to allow for higher resolutions, especially with the benefit of more modern temporal upscalers like DLSS, alongside increased RT sample counts, longer draw distances and so on. However, the CPU demands of a world this complex – tuned around console Zen 2 cores at 30fps – 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.”
IGN is one of the very few outlets to have been given an exclusive preview of GTA 6. We also have details on GTA 6’s romance system, how long GTA 6 will take to beat, every GTA 6 side activity we’ve spotted so far, and how GTA 6’s bigger map compares to past Rockstar games as part of our exhaustive and ongoing coverage. Up to speed on all that? Here’s 69 new gameplay details we spotted during our time with GTA 6.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
