"If Grand Theft Auto VI can run on the Xbox Series S, why can't your game hit 60 frames per second on it?" is the question and argument many fans are using against developers these days, and Thomas Mahler, the founder of Moon Studios, has finally had enough. Mahler, whose studio made the Ori games and No Rest for the Wicked, fired off a blunt reply.
Here's an excerpt of what he said on X:
I just love comments like: "How dare your game isn't running at 60fps on Xbox Series S yet when GTA VI will run on it?!?!" 1) We don't know yet how well that thing will run. 2) Well, gee, I don't know, MAYBE it's because Rockstar literally just spent over a billion dollars and had THOUSANDS of people working on it for over a decade now?
He was not much kinder about the Series S itself, describing it as a cheap machine with less usable memory than a Valve Steam Deck and writing off the loudest demands as fanboyism from people who do not understand the tech. He isn't lying. The Xbox Series S is Microsoft's cheaper current-generation console, the little white one that launched at $299 that's quite literally half the console its big brother, the Xbox Series X, is, figuratively and literally.
Xbox Series X versus Series S
Spec | Xbox Series X | Xbox Series S |
|---|---|---|
GPU power | About 12.15 teraflops | About 4 teraflops |
Total RAM | 16 GB | 10 GB |
RAM usable by games | More headroom | Roughly 8 GB after the system's share |
Launch price (2020) | $499 | $299 |
Despite coming from the same console generation, the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X are very different machines.
The Series S has roughly a third of the Series X's graphics muscle and, once the system takes its cut, only about eight gigabytes of memory for the actual game. Developers have wrestled with this technical ceiling for years, especially after Microsoft required nearly every Xbox game ship on both machines. This means the weakest box in the room sets the limit for everyone, including the PlayStation 5, and Mahler is right that pinning that responsibility on a small studio while pointing at a project with the kind of unlimited budget GTA 6 has at its disposal is not a fair fight.
With that said, analysts at Digital Foundry are expecting the Series S version to drop as low as 720p with ray tracing gutted just to hold a stable 30, so very few with technical know-how are saying GTA 6 will run well on the pint-sized console. It's not just on the Series S too. Multiple experts, and a former Rockstar animator, think GTA 6 will be locked to 30 frames per second on every current-gen console, the PlayStation 5 and Series X included, because Rockstar obsesses over visual detail more than frame rates per second.
This still doesn't change the fact that the Series S has become the anchor dragging on this console generation, the reason ambitious games keep getting clipped or delayed, and players are not wrong to express their annoyance. They're just better off pointing it at the right target. Moon Studios didn't build the Series S. Rockstar didn't either. Microsoft did, and it's the one requiring developers to make sure every game they release this console generation also runs well on the Series S. If there's anyone who deserves all the fingers pointed to it, it's Microsoft.
Ultimately, this is what's become of GTA 6. It's a a performance yardstick for other games even though it's not even released yet. It's come to a point that it's winning performance arguments before fans can preload it.
Fingers crossed, we'll get a slightly better sense of how it looks in motion when the Extended Look hits Netflix on August 27 with at least a smidge of gameplay footage.