Rockstar gave “Grand Theft Auto” fans their first extended look at “Grand Theft Auto 6” today on Netflix with a 27-minute video featuring gameplay, cutscenes, and more. To call it one of the most anticipated titles of the year is an understatement. And while there are certainly questions looming around the upcoming release — including some resulting from the recent leaks – one of the biggest questions on a lot of minds right now is just how well can users expect the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S to hold up under the pressure of Rockstar’s latest title.
There’s no question that the long-awaited “GTA 6” looks like the next evolution of Rockstar’s abilities, with updated visuals, reflections, animations, and behavioral AI. And while the gameplay did appear to hold up for the most part during the extended preview, it was impossible not to notice how large the world is, and how crowded and alive it appears to be.
That kind of living, breathing world takes a ton of power and resources to keep running smoothly, so with that in mind, is performance something fans need to worry about? Unfortunately, that question is difficult to answer, as Rockstar hasn’t revealed details about how the game runs in regard to FPS or other performance metrics.
Will this console generation hold GTA 6 back?
The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are no slouches — we even called the PS5 the best console PlayStation ever made. However, that was nearly six years ago, and with what Rockstar is trying to pull off in “GTA 6,” the game is going to be demanding a lot from that hardware. According to Netflix, the gameplay featured in the extended look was captured on a base PS5. That’s good news for those who might not believe that the PS5 Pro is worth every penny, especially after Sony hiked the price on it earlier this year. However, despite how smooth the game might have looked, we need to take a look at how “GTA 5” performed when it launched on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
It is important to note that when “GTA 5” came to the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the game still only offered up to 30 FPS when running at a native 4K resolution. If you wanted 60 FPS, then you had to run the game in upscaled resolutions, using what Rockstar called Performance mode. You also had the option of running it in Performance RT mode, which retains some of the ray tracing effects added in the upgrade to the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Overall, the game ran smoothly, but it’s difficult to ignore the limitations it ran into, even on the newer hardware of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
While it’s still too early to say that the current generation of consoles will hold “GTA 6” back, it will be surprising if Rockstar has somehow found a way to achieve higher quality visuals than in “GTA 5” while running it at performance benchmarks we weren’t even seeing on the older, presumably less-intensive “GTA 5” when it hit these same consoles.
GTA 6 might launch without 60 FPS
Whether or not “GTA 6” will be limited by hardware is a particularly interesting question, and likely one that many fans — especially those who prefer playing these games on PC — are going to be asking. Speaking of which, we still don’t have a PC release date for the game. It also builds directly off the bigger question about performance as a whole.
For as impressive as the extended look was, we know that “GTA 6” caps out at 30 frames per second (via Flow Games), though that could change in the future. This won’t matter to many gamers, and it obviously won’t have any impact on the game’s sales, but it’s one of the compromises Rockstar had to make to build a world this lively, enormous, and interactive. That’s a compromise plenty of people will be more than willing to accept, even for an $80 game.
In the meantime, we’ll be curious to see what the game looks like when it’s not in a controlled environment. It might have more to do with the compression on Netflix than the game itself, but there were a few slight visual hiccups in the extended look, even though Rockstar had complete control over every frame we saw. It’s something to look out for when we’re finally able to get our hands on the game and put it through its paces.
