Grand Theft Auto VI’s new screenshots look astonishingly detailed, but Digital Foundry believes that very ambition may make 60 frames per second on consoles difficult to achieve. The analysts consider 30 FPS, or perhaps a 40 FPS option on PS5 Pro, more likely than a true 60 FPS mode.
Whenever Rockstar releases new material from Grand Theft Auto VI, the community immediately starts examining every frame for clues about what the final game may look like. The opening of pre-orders was no exception, as Rockstar Games released a fresh batch of images that sparked major discussion. For Digital Foundry, the visual quality raises a question that goes beyond how good the game looks: what level of performance can current consoles realistically deliver once this world is running in real time?
Rockstar shared a total of 63 new screenshots. Unlike typical YouTube trailers, they were not heavily compressed, allowing analysts to inspect the images in much greater detail. Digital Foundry’s first impression was that the polish looked almost unprecedented, immediately prompting questions about what hardware, settings and development environment could have produced them.
The most striking feature is the ray-traced reflections visible across almost every image. They appear on the polished metal of Jason’s weapon, in vehicle windows and across wet roads, using more realistic light calculations than traditional screen-space reflection techniques. Those older solutions can only reflect what is currently visible to the camera, meaning off-screen buildings, cars or characters often disappear entirely from puddles and glass. Ray tracing can preserve those details even when they are outside the player’s immediate view, although Digital Foundry expects Rockstar to retain older methods as a fallback whenever full ray tracing would become too demanding.
Fog and smoke also appear to have real volume, giving the environments a much denser sense of depth. In one of the examples, a car hood reveals the engine solely through its reflection, even though the game does not otherwise draw that information directly on screen. Pools and fountains appear to work in a similar way, reflecting objects or buildings outside the camera frame. Jason and Lucia’s hair also seems to be rendered strand by strand, with edge lighting that pushes the images even closer to a cinematic look.
That is precisely why Digital Foundry is not convinced that the screenshots come from ordinary console gameplay. The analysts believe the images could have been generated from an internal development build running with maximum settings, but they also consider the possibility of a specially prepared scene designed to show every detail at its best. Another explanation could be an unannounced photo mode, allowing Rockstar to create images at a much higher quality level than the final game will use during normal play.
“We find it unlikely that these are real-time results on PS5, Xbox Series X, or at best, on a PS5 Pro console.”
Digital Foundry Thinks the CPU, Not the Graphics, Could Limit GTA 6
Notebookcheck has suggested that the screenshots may have been generated from an unconfirmed PC version, as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X hardware may not be capable of handling this level of real-time reflection rendering. Digital Foundry takes a more cautious view: ray tracing is expected to be part of the console version in some form, but the real issue is how many compromises Rockstar will need to make and what frame rate those compromises will allow.
The analysts have therefore lowered expectations for a 60 FPS mode considerably. In their view, even PS5 Pro may struggle to run Rockstar’s open world at 60 frames per second, because the main obstacle is not GPU power but CPU performance. PS5 Pro may offer a far stronger graphics processor, improved ray tracing and PSSR upscaling, but its CPU is only modestly faster than that of the standard PS5. A dense city packed with advanced AI, countless vehicles, physics systems and complex simulation workloads could create a bottleneck that graphical upgrades alone cannot fully solve.
Digital Foundry also notes that GTA IV, GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 all launched at 30 FPS on consoles, while 60 FPS became available later on PC or through newer versions. That makes a 30 FPS or 40 FPS option on PS5 Pro appear more realistic than a genuine 60 FPS mode. A 40 FPS setting could offer a visibly smoother experience for players with 120 Hz displays without demanding the same CPU workload as doubling the frame rate.
Rockstar has not yet confirmed the final technical details, so the current conclusions remain based on the materials released so far and on earlier Rockstar games. Digital Foundry does not rule out a surprise, but it would consider one historic. “If we’re wrong, this would be Rockstar’s first open-world game to target 60 frames per second on consoles. It seems unlikely, but we’d love to be proven wrong.”
Source: 3DJuegos
