by The full gameplay reveal of Grand Theft Auto 6 was accompanied by a range of press opportunities, but it's this article from Flow Games that caught our eye. According to the site, Rockstar's Rob Nelson has confirmed that the console versions of the game run at 30 frames per second - as seen in the Extended Look footage. The article also suggests that Nelson would need to consult with the tech team to find out if the game will have a 60 frames per second option at launch or beyond - and ultimately what follows can only be speculation or educated guesswork. Only Rockstar knows about the performance capabilities of its latest game.
That said, based on the quality of the presentation we saw in the Extended Look, we'd venture to suggest that higher frame-rates are a feature that becomes viable once PlayStation 6 and Project Helix arrive, because if there's any game that can seriously make the claim to have "tapped out" the current generation consoles, it's Grand Theft Auto 6 - which we've described as "perhaps the most impressive showcase we've seen in real-time rendering."
At launch, it will also be the most performant GTA series entry in the series' 3D history. Right up to the launch of Grand Theft Auto 5 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Rockstar has pushed fidelity ahead of performance. While the Extended Look is - unfortunately - only mastered as a 30 frames per second video, we did scan its entire 48,242 frame run-time and in the game content, there's a closer, tighter lock to 30fps than any of its predecessors (remasters and enhanced editions don't count).
What's curious about Rob Nelson's reported comments is the need to consult the tech team about a 60 frames per second option. To achieve the kind of fidelity we're seeing in the footage, the evidence strongly suggests that it is a 30fps game by design. The scale of the achievement here is such that performance targets would have had to have been set in stone early on in the game's development. Rockstar doesn't spare the horses on any part of current generation console architecture.
Based on pixel counts, rendering resolution is a native 2560x1440 or something very close to it - an ambitious target for consoles swiftly reaching their sixth birthday, but Rockstar ramps up the features on display to an astonishing degree: ray-traced reflections and global illumination (with perhaps a hint of selective RT shadows), alongside the most phenomenal hair rendering we've seen. Character detail and lighting is off the charts. World rendering looks remarkably free of noticeable level of detail "pop-in". The amount of rendered vehicles and NPCs is also notable. To achieve a 60fps mode means that all of these elements would need to be rendered in half the time.
Possible? Perhaps, with big cutbacks. But how much of Rockstar's vision for the game would be lost in doing so? Graphics are scalable and perhaps features could hit the chopping block. To what extent is ray tracing actually required? Does the game need to run at circa 1440p? The Xbox Series S version - which remains unseen at this point - may point to the ways in which the studio may feel comfortable in paring back visuals. But that's just half the battle.
The CPU side of the equation is crucial here as Rockstar's new playground doesn't just look pretty, it's running a highly sophisticated game world. The sheer number of vehicles and NPCs is reliant just as much on the consoles' Zen 2 CPU cores as it is on RDNA 2 graphics. Reports have spoken of unprecedented NPC "agency" - something only hinted at in the Extended Look. Add on physics calculations, streaming the open world at speed and maintaining the BVH structure for the ray tracing features and we should expect to see the CPU close to full capacity. A 60fps mode means that all of those same features would need to run at 2x speed.
So, where does that leave PS5 Pro, the most performant of the current gen consoles? Surely the extra horsepower should make a difference, right? Granted, the nature of Sony's enhanced console is that the graphics side of the equation is improved. PS5 games can run faster as a result, while the system's ray tracing hardware is also substantially better.
However, the CPU remains the same with a 3.85GHz clock speed vs the standard PS5's 3.5GHz. In our gaming tests in CPU-limited scenarios, we've seen an approximate seven percent improvement in performance. This is better for a more stable experience, but it is hardly transformative.
The next question concerns a potential 40fps mode - clearly more achievable than 60fps. Whether this is possible really depends on how much CPU overhead there is on the current game and the extent to which that extra Pro performance might make a difference. The Extended Look footage is solid enough to suggest that there is some overhead, but we're still looking at a 33.3ms target (30fps) shrinking down to 25ms (40fps). This is easier with graphics but far more challenging with the simulation and streaming tasks for the CPU.
Taken together, the Extended Look evidence points to a deliberate trade: Rockstar has chosen to spend its budget on simulation depth, extreme graphical fidelity and sheer world density, as opposed to chasing a highly challenging 60fps target. GTA 6 is a rare thing for this generation - a big-budget blockbuster that behaves like a truly "30fps-first" design. We're eager to see if the situation changes for launch or beyond, but technically, 30fps makes sense.
The Extended Look presentation already stands alone as a singular technological achievement for the generation - and we're not so sure it would be at this scale, with this fidelity, on this hardware if it had targeted 60fps instead. We'll be fascinated to see if events prove us wrong.