Digital Foundry watched the same Grand Theft Auto VI Extended Look everyone else did and came back with two conclusions. The first is something many, if not all, of us can agree with, with the outlet describing it as the "most impressive example of real-time game rendering." The second, more unfortunate, is that it has reason to believe that this is also why getting the game to run at 60 FPS on current consoles is extremely unlikely.
Digital Foundry points at the CPU as the culprit for this limitation, which is the part of the console that runs the world rather than draws it. They've already pointed this out in the past, and it seems like the latest GTA 6 footage only reinforced their belief. Their long is that you can usually claw back frames by turning the visuals down, but you can't easily turn down the thing actually eating a chunk of Rockstar Games' budget. We're talking about the hundreds of reactive NPCs and crowd systems, the dense nightlife and packed streets, the body and lifestyle simulation, the physics, and more.
The fact that the footage showed the game running at a stable 30 FPS, captured on the same base PS5 sitting in your living room right now, is a landmark.
What Digital Foundry is getting is that we can't accuse Rockstar of doing a lazy job or a last-minute swap à la Ubisoft and Watch Dogs when it's squeezing every ounce of performance from currently available hardware, and then some.
What Digital Foundry concluded about the Extended Look
Finding | Digital Foundry's read |
|---|---|
Visual quality | Perhaps the most impressive real-time rendering it has ever seen |
How it runs | Around 1440p and a mostly stable 30 FPS, on a base PS5 |
A 60 FPS console mode | Extremely unlikely, with the CPU as the main wall |
Even a PC version | Hitting 60 FPS would be genuinely challenging |
The technical verdict this piece builds on rather than repeats is credited to Digital Foundry's analysis.
Does this make playing GTA 6 at potentially 30 FPS any less frustrating? Of course not. It's 2026. People are expecting to play games at 60 FPS. There is a demand for more powerful consoles like the PlayStation 5 Pro for a reason, and that's because players want to play smoother games at much higher resolutions.
Honestly, we should've seen this coming. Rockstar did the same thing with Red Dead Redemption 2, choosing spectacle over smoothness on purpose. The fair ask then is not to demand 60 FPS from Rockstar, but for the studio to eventually give players the choice, whether that is a 40 FPS middle ground or a post-launch performance mode. Rob Nelson, at least, has not closed that door.
If you're wondering if a PC port of GTA 6 would solve all of this, Digital Foundry says even a PC pushing the game at 60 would be a genuine challenge, suggesting that the current console generation has simply been outrun by what Rockstar is attempting. The definitive, buttery version of GTA 6 may really be a future-hardware experience, and players today are lucky to get something this cutting-edge this early on, with the only compromise being a 30 FPS limitation.
Admittedly, it's a strange, slightly bittersweet spot for the biggest game of the generation to occupy, but it's better than nothing.
To be fair, perhaps we were expecting too much anyway. You don't get the most reactive open world Rockstar has ever built, on hardware from 2020, with a locked 60 stacked on top of a higher resolution. Something had to give, and Digital Foundry's analysis is the clearest proof yet of what gave and why.
We would still like the choice down the line, but if the cost of the best-looking game anyone has watched run in real time is playing it at half the usual frame rate, that is a bill most of us will happily settle on November 19.