Why GTA 6 Targets 30 FPS At Launch And 60 FPS May Be A Long Shot

It has become almost customary this generation for new video games to target 60 FPS, if not in general then at least with a 'Performance Mode' which may or may not actually reach that value on the contemporary game consoles. Because of the lengthy cross-generational period where games were being released on both the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5, it was trivial for developers to have this 60 FPS mode in PS5 games, and as a result, PS5 gamers have somewhat come to expect 60 FPS in video games, much like PC gamers. According to Brazilian site Flow Games, Rockstarr North Co-Studio Head Rob Nelson says GTA 6 is capped at 30 FPS and is probably going to remain that way.

According to Rob Nelson, Development Lead and Co-Director at Rockstar North, in this development period, the consoles are running the game at 30 frames per second. According to the director, it is still necessary to consult the technical team to find out if there is a 60 FPS option at launch (or in the future).
— Flow Games

Okay, technically what he said to Flow Games was apparently that "it is still necessary to consult the technical team to determine if there will be a 60 FPS option at launch (or in the future)." This is kind of a mealy-mouthed PR answer; if you're familiar with this sort of thing, what he's actually saying is "we might potentially hit 60 FPS in a future release, but it's absolutely not happening for the PS5 launch." That's completely understandable if you know the tech underneath the game, as GTA 6 is incredibly unlikely to approach 60 FPS even if it ships with an unlocked framerate mode.


When you target 30 FPS, you have 33.3 milliseconds between each frame to have your application, which runs on your entire machine (at least on a game console), do whatever it needs to do. In other words, you have 1/30th of a second to complete all of the tasks required for one video frame. At 60 FPS, this obviously gets cut down to 1/60th of a second, or 16.7 milliseconds. Now, 16 and two-thirds milliseconds isn't very much time, and doubling it is still not very much time. However, doubling it gives you, in comparison, all the time in the world to handle tasks that need to be completed by the game engine.


Grand Theft Auto 6 isn't just another open world game. I'm not trying to imply that it's particularly special from a technological point of view, but it is rare in that it is clearly designed from the ground up for a 30 FPS cap, which hasn't really been a thing this generation. This is what allows it to have what appears to be a never-before-seen level of city simulation and graphical fidelity, at least for a PlayStation 5 game. The fact that the game was architected from the ground up for 30 FPS means that the developers can commit to letting the engine take twice as long to handle simulation, AI, ray-tracing, and whatever else. And the ray-tracing workload in this game is relatively light compared to modern PC games, but the PlayStation 5 uses a preliminary version of the RDNA 2 graphics architecture; it isn't exactly a ray-tracing powerhouse.


In short, it's very likely that GTA 6 is tightly optimized to make use of the full PlayStation 5. It's not running at 30 FPS because the developers couldn't get it running at 60 FPS. It's running at 30 FPS as a conscious choice to maximize the fidelity available on a base-model PlayStation 5, and all that uncapping the framerate is going to do is get you an inconsistent, juddery presentation that looks terrible. And because the game is likely CPU-limited in any case, it's fairly unlikely that the PlayStation 5 Pro will do much better than the base model, as the PS5 Pro only has a very modest bump in CPU clock rates over the standard PS5 to improve its CPU performance—it uses the same Zen 2 CPUs as the base model, and the AMD Ryzen 3000 series.


If you're lamenting the lack of 60 FPS in GTA 6, keep in mind that a main-series GTA game has never shipped on consoles with a 60 FPS cap. Re-releases and platform ports have bumped the frame rate, but Rockstar North has always targeted a 30 FPS cap with main-line GTA releases. If you enjoyed GTA V on the PlayStation 4 or especially the PlayStation 3, you should have no problem enjoying this release. If you're hyped about the upcoming launch in November, definitely check out Flow Games' full article because there are more insights from Rob Nelson there than just the one we borrowed above.


And if you're reading HotHardware, there's a fair chance you're a PC gamer, so settle down and wait for the inevitable PC release with the rest of us. If you have even decent modern PC hardware, your machine blows the PS5 out of the water (certainly on CPU horsepower, at least), and it's very likely that your machine will support the virtually guaranteed 60 FPS mode available to that version whenever it arrives, likely sometime in late 2027 or early 2028.