After dealer leaks and insider information recently fueled hope for a smooth 60 FPS in “GTA 6”, the technology experts at Digital Foundry are now bringing the community back down to earth. Accordingly, a performance mode on PS5 and even on the PS5 Pro is “a bridge too far”.
Last week Rockstar launched pre-orders for „GTA 6“. But while reports say already Billions flow into the coffers Real, uncut gameplay from the open-world blockbuster is still a long time coming.
Accordingly, the crucial question of performance is still being discussed heatedly. Hope arose through supposed leaks from MediaMarkt Poland, which were from classic Quality and performance mode languages. In addition, the Polish insider Borys Nieśpielak also supported the rumors brought 60 FPS into the game.
But now the technology experts from Digital Foundry came onto the scene, giving the euphoria a good dose of realism – and thus putting a bitter damper on the fans’ hopes.
The CPU bottleneck: When the game world becomes too complex
In their analysis, the specialists made it clear that a smooth 60 frames per second in “GTA 6” on the consoles would most likely be unattainable. The problem: Not the graphics card, but the processor. Because “GTA 6” simulates a living world in a dimension that eclipses everything that has existed before – from the AI of passers-by to the animal world to the complex vehicle physics.
“Unfortunately, the level of detail seen in the trailer, pre-order screenshots, and other recent footage appears extremely difficult to scale down to enable a 60 FPS mode,” explained Will Judd of Digital Foundry.
It continues: “In RPGs, dense urban areas are most susceptible to frame rate drops, and the world of GTA 6 looks an order of magnitude more demanding than games like Dragon’s Dogma 2 or Baldur’s Gate 3.”
On top of that, one of the hallmarks of the series – namely the fast movement in an open game world – is likely to shatter the 60 FPS dream: “Added to this is the fact that in GTA 6 you can move significantly faster on land, water or in the air than in both RPGs mentioned – and with vehicles that require their own, computationally expensive physics. Such factors usually bring simulation games on consoles to their knees. 60 FPS therefore feel like a bridge too far.”
Does the PS5 Pro save the frame rate?
Of course, the community’s doubts were already high in advance, but there was still a glimmer of hope in the PS5 Pro, which is currently the most powerful console on the market.
But here too, Digital Foundry is dampening expectations. Although the Pro shines with higher GPU performance and Sony’s in-house AI upscaler PSSR, the CPU only clocks around ten percent faster than the standard model. And since the bottleneck lies in the CPU calculation of the game world, even the best graphics performance is of little use.
Therefore, Judd predicts a different scenario for the PS5 Pro: “However, keep in mind that the console offers only a minimal CPU performance boost compared to the base PS5 (…). None of these features actually do anything to reduce CPU load. Therefore, it looks much more likely that GTA 6 will launch on the PS5 Pro with a 30 FPS or 40 FPS mode than with a 60 FPS option.”
The dealer leaks: just standard texts?
But what about the supposedly solid information from Amazon and Co.? According to Digital Foundry, you shouldn’t pay attention to these marketing phrases. After all, almost every game these days uses terms like performance and quality mode by default, so traders would often resort to automated placeholder texts or AI-generated summaries.
A look at its history also shows that Rockstar follows a clear philosophy: „GTA 4“, „GTA 5“ or „Red Dead Redemption 2“ all launched on consoles with a focus on maximum visual opulence at a maximum of 30 FPS. Upgrades with performance options only followed years later – if at all.
In the end, however, Will Judd leaves a small glimmer of hope for the players and explained with a smile: “At the end of the day, this is all speculation and – of course – we could be wrong. However, if we are wrong, this would be the first open-world game from Rockstar ever to target 60 frames per second on a console (…). It seems unlikely, but we would be happy if we were proven wrong!”
Fans will probably only find out the final truth when Rockstar itself reveals the technical details – or at the latest on November 19, 2026, when “GTA 6” is released for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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