Ever since the recent leaks of PS5 Pro specs, many have been hyping Sony’s mid-gen refresh as the perfect console for the biggest game of this generation: GTA 6. There’s been a lot of speculation that there will be a huge gulf in performance when playing Rockstar’s upcoming behemoth on the PS5 Pro versus the baseline PS5 and Xbox Series X, including that the Pro would be able to run GTA 6 at 60fps. However, new insight from the tech gurus at Digital Foundry claim this likely won’t be the case.
GTA 6 has the potential to be one of the best open world games ever – dare we say it, maybe even one of the best games of any genre. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about it though, including how it will run on Sony’s juiced-up new console.
In a special episode of DF Direct, the Digital Foundry team reveals more info about the PS5 Pro and the performance you can expect. Not only is there plenty of analysis on the leaked specs that have emerged so far, but DF’s Rich Leadbetter also makes the claim that the upgrades being made to the PS5 Pro won’t be enough to drag a game like GTA 6 from 30fps to 60fps.
“The games that are targeting 30fps right now are not going to be targeting 60fps on PlayStation 5 Pro if they’re CPU-limited,” Leadbetter explains. “So all of the conjecture that ‘hey this is going to be a great box for Grand Theft Auto 6, we’ll be able to run that at 60 frames per second’, unless there’s some magical CPU stuff being done by Rockstar I suggest that’s not going to happen.”
Essentially, unless Rockstar gets GTA 6 running at 60fps across all platforms as standard, it’s incredibly unlikely that the PS5 Pro is going to have enough grunt to drag the frame rate up. Given the scope of the game, this seems unlikely to be the case when the GTA 6 release date arrives next year.
So what gives? Wasn’t the PS5 Pro meant to be this mighty, performance-boosting mega machine? Well, when it comes to frame rate, the main issue is that the PS5 Pro’s CPU is the same as the one you find in the standard PS5 with only a 10% improvement on performance. As Leadbetter states, a “10% [increase] on clocks isn’t really going to do much at all”.
“It will help your worst possible frame rates when you’re CPU-limited, but it’s not a game changer,” he adds.
While there are certainly some meaningful upgrades being made to the performance power of the PS5 Pro, it will be interesting to see just how much of a benefit it will provide (and how many games those benefits will reach). The big impact appears to be on resolution, as the Pro’s new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling tech will reportedly be able to upscale old 1080p games into 4K. It’s also claimed that the PS5 Pro will free up an extra 1.2GB of system RAM for developers to play with, which is helpful for features like ray tracing.
While you wait for the next dose of GTA 6 info or a new trailer, check out our predictions for some of the celebrity cameos we’re expecting to see in Vice City. In other big PlayStation news, Sony just pressed pause on PSVR2 production because gamers aren’t buying its virtual reality hardware fast enough.