GTA 6 may struggle to run at a stable 60 FPS on consoles, former Rockstar producer says

GTA 6 might not hit 60 FPS on consoles at launch, according to a former Rockstar technical director who worked on GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption.

The comments came from John Ricchio, a former Rockstar producer, during a podcast appearance with Reece "Kiwi Talkz" Reilly. Ricchio discussed the difficulty of holding a high frame rate on current-generation hardware given the scale and ambition of GTA 6, and his comments suggest fans should temper their expectations around a native 60 FPS mode.

Rumors of a 60 FPS performance mode for GTA 6 have circulated for some time, but Ricchio's comments cast doubt on whether that is achievable without cutting back on visual quality, something Rockstar has historically been reluctant to do. According to Ricchio, Rockstar will likely lean toward graphical fidelity and object density over a higher frame rate when weighing the tradeoff.

Multiple leaks and retailer listings have pointed to GTA 6 shipping with both 30 FPS and 60 FPS modes on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Rockstar has not confirmed any of these details. The studio has a long history of launching major console titles capped at 30 FPS, then adding a 60 FPS mode sometime after release.

John’s comments line up with what Digital Foundry reported a few weeks earlier. The outlet pointed to CPU demands, not graphics, as the real bottleneck, given how much processing power GTA 6's dense open world, traffic, and physics simulation require, especially at the high speeds players can reach by car, boat, or aircraft. The PS5 Pro's biggest gains come from its GPU, while its CPU is only slightly faster than the standard PS5, so Digital Foundry considers a 40 FPS mode more realistic than a full 60 FPS even on the upgraded console.

In a separate development from earlier this week, updated Xbox Store listings suggested that GTA 6's story mode and GTA Online could be separate downloads. That could be a storage-saving option for players who want to drop the campaign once they move on to the online mode, though it has also fuelled speculation that GTA Online might eventually ship or be sold on its own. Rockstar has not commented on either possibility.