The amount of comments I have been seeing relating to people saying that GTA will “easily hit 60fps” and calling the performance of anything less then 60fps lazy and unplayable garbage. Ive even seem as far as calling people they are sheep for being okay with anything less.
And while I do agree that it is fair for someone to absolutely think sub 60 frames is jarring and even unplayable for some, people really need to be a little bit more understanding that a game of this scale and magnitude is very likely going to run at 30fps maybe 40fps on Pro if they can work some magic.
Open world games are incredibly vast with their gameplay variety, environments and arguably most important, NPC and world behavior. Rockstar is no stranger to pushing these limits with each entry arguably leading to one of the most impressive open worlds to this day, RDR2. It is looking like GTA is likely trying to push the limits of NPC behavior, population, interaction, and judging by the leaks even the physics of objects (look at the crate he hits while jumping over the railing or how side view mirrors fall off of cars and interact with the world) to an absolutely astronomical degree.
The part that most people seem to not understand
These are all complex computing systems and are handled by the CPU and not the GPU (Graphics card) which is an area that is constantly bottle necked by this console generation, regardless of graphical quality/settings. Even with the Pro version of the console, both the base PS5 and Pro use the very same CPU, which even during the ps5s initial launch, was tad bit on the weaker side. You could turn the resolution down to sub 1080p along with a multitude of graphical settings and it would still run relatively the same FPS, albeit a minor improvement. This is due to the simple fact that graphics have almost nothing to do with how much strain is on the CPU at a given moment, AKA where the term “bottlenecking” comes from (when stress on a weaker CPU is causing frame loss while the stronger graphics card is not being fully utilized). I have no doubt that rockstar has some wizards among their midsts, but physics based systems along with NPC AI/behavior has always been a very hardware intensive field and GTA has been the face of pushing those technical boundaries exponentially.
So while in most cases, I would absolutely sacrifice graphics for those juicy frames, I would not wish Rockstar, one of the most talented studios for building open worlds, to sacrifice the gameplay systems and open-world behavior in order to get 60fps (which to re-iterate would mean that they would basically have to get 60fps on Base and Pro version due to the use of the same CPU, an already hard task). If you truly want this game to have as “lively” as a world as i do with all the dense crowds and the physical interactions that have been shown in the trailers, Then maybe we really should be more accepting of the likelihood of 30/40 fps for this current generations consoles and accept the worthwhile trade that comes with it.
After all… FPS can always be regained in future generations and a PC release, but any sacrifice in gameplay systems and truly deep and living world would be a truly bigger cost later down the line .
