All evidence points to GTA 6 launching at 30FPS locked, no 60FPS mode

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Rockstar has rocked the gaming world with the release of the second trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, and while the graphics are absolutely stunning it has begged the question as to what framerate gamers will experience at launch.

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The new trailer was analyzed by the tech experts over at Digital Foundry, widely regarded as the gold standard when it comes to gaming hardware/software analysis, and what they have gathered is that the footage we can see it has a 2560 x 1152p resolution. This strange resolution is due to the letterboxing, bringing the aspect ratio to 20:9. Notably, the letterboxing has been added in the trailer for cinematic effect, meaning the game won't have this strange resolution at launch.

In terms of the overall image quality, the experts suggest Rockstar has used some upscaling technology similar to a level of FSR 1. Other areas highlighted by the tech experts are the inclusion of Ray-Traced Global Illumination (RTGI), ray-traced reflections, assets looking extremely high detail, and the absence of rasterized lighting. Other areas praised by the tech experts were characters receiving the appropriate shading, fine environmental details, and the immaculate rendering of hair.

With all that being said, and the obvious incredible work Rockstar has put into developing GTA 6, the experts asked each other if they thought the game was going to have a 60FPS mode at launch.

Q: Do you think this game is going to have a 60FPS mode, or do you think it will be 30FPS only at launch?

A: There are just some things they can't cut. For cutscenes, what they could do they could just keep them at 30FPS and just turn on extra features for them. But you can't get rid of RTGI, it's inherent to how the game works. Even getting rid of RT reflections could make scenes look quite a bit different if the game is artistically designed around them. And they are all throughout the trailer, so they have obviously made them as a purposeful part of the gameplay.

As soon as you have RTGI, a massive open world, those things tend to not run well at 60FPS. In terms of these cinematics, we are looking at something that's higher than 1080p, but not a whole lot higher than 1080p in some aspects. Then you have to talk about crunching that down to 60FPS. Like what type of resolution will be running there with an FSR 1 upscaler? Would you even want that level of resolution at all as a game designer?

And historically, in the past, all of the games have released at 30FPS since Table Tennis. I think everything points to this being a 30FPS game, maybe with a 40FPS mode.