With all the hype building around Grand Theft Auto VI, one of the biggest questions players keep circling back to is simple: what kind of performance modes are we actually going to get on consoles this time? With the PS5 Pro promising a noticeable bump in power and Sony talking up its new PSSR tech, it is easy to start dreaming about higher frame rates. Still, after listening to Rich, John and Alex on the Digital Foundry podcast, it feels like people might want to dial expectations back a little.

Their chat had a very familiar vibe for anyone who follows Rockstar Games. Even with newer hardware, GTA 6 is almost certainly going to lean heavily on the CPU. That is kind of Rockstar’s trademark at this point. Their worlds chew through CPU time with crowds, traffic behavior, physics, background routines and all the odd simulation stuff you never think about while playing. More GPU power helps with visuals, but when the CPU is the part struggling to keep up, 60FPS becomes a tough ask.

PSSR came up too. It stands for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, which is Sony’s new upscaling tech. It sharpens a lower resolution image into something that looks close to native while easing the load on the GPU. What it does not do is magically lighten the CPU work, though, and that is where Rockstar games usually feel the squeeze, so it cannot fix the main issue here.