Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Buying A PS5 Pro For 60 FPS ‘GTA 6’? Well, You Might Want To Hear This

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The reception to Sony’s announcement of the PS5 Pro wasn’t just tepid, in many instances it was downright hostile as the company seems to be charging $700 for a system that has what appear to be relatively minor improvements which were demonstrated on often years-old games, many of which also released on PS4.

It has also been reinforced that “PS5 Pro enhanced” does not mean a guaranteed 60 fps on those games the way some were thinking. Sony only specified some of the games shown were 60 fps, and that was still listed as a “target.” Something that the PS5 also said it would “target” when it was released, even if the Pro is getting there more often.

As such, it was easily to make another logical leap. For some, the appeal of a PS5 is the idea that it would be the best piece of hardware to play the upcoming GTA 6, no doubt one of the biggest video game releases of all time. But we have truly no idea what a PS5 Pro may be able to enhance there, and the idea that you would be running GTA 6 at 60 fps when it’s 30 everywhere else seems almost impossible as this is a fully next-gen, resource-intensive, third party game and we already know the Pro has limits on framerate with some older games.

Don’t believe me? Well, Digital Foundry just chimed in during a conversation with IGN’s Matt Purslow that says the same thing when asked about if PS5 would hit 60 fps for GTA 6:

“No. Grand Theft Auto games have always run complex simulations that push the CPU hard, which is why every GTA game has initially launched on their target platforms at 30fps (or lower!).

“The PS5 Pro uses the same CPU as the PS5 and it would be extremely challenging to hit 60fps if the base PS5 version is targeting 30fps,” he explains. “This isn’t a GPU problem, it’s a CPU problem.”

In other words, the 67% bigger GPU Sony has advertised would mean nothing in this situation, and Rockstar games so far have always launched at 30 fps. PS5 Pro pushing that to 60 fps at launch given the hardware and Rockstar’s own targets seems like it will simply not happen. This is not to say there will not be other improvements, but some sort of guaranteed high framerate is not one of them.

It is factual that because GTA 6 is not releasing on PC, the PS5 Pro will indeed be the most powerful hardware running the game, at least for a while. But until it’s clear what improvements will actually be made over the base version, which is likely not a big framerate jump, you may want to hold off on the idea that GTA 6 itself would be worth the $700 purchase.

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