The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S ushered in the era of 60 fps gaming on consoles. Players have come to expect, at the very least, a performance mode that scales the rest of the visuals down in order to accommodate a higher image refresh rate and smoother-looking animations. But Grand Theft Auto 6, the sequel some have waited over a decade for, will be locked at 30 fps across all platforms, including PS5 Pro. How are some people taking this? Not well.
Rockstar Games confirmed the news yesterday, though it shouldn’t have necessarily come as a big surprise. Studio development head Rob Nelson was reportedly telling content creators as much back during the August extended gameplay reveal. GTA 6 was running at 30 fps at the time, and while he wouldn’t rule out a 60 fps mode down the line, nothing was being promised for launch.
So what’s the big deal? If you’re tuning in to gaming for the first time in a while just for GTA 6, the framerate affects how crisp and natural a game looks in motion. 30 fps has more of a movie quality to it since there are fewer frames showing each precise change in the picture. 60 fps is often described as “buttery smooth” because all of the animations flow together more seamlessly. Some people still struggle to tell the difference between the two modes. For others, the difference is immediately jarring.
Is this 30fps, or 60fps?
Guess! pic.twitter.com/B34ZFsdbex
— warmoaran3 II (@warmoaran3s) November 11, 2026
“Targeting? 30fps? on the PS5 Pro? What is in this game?” one person wrote on X. “‘Targeting 30 fps’ implies the game isn’t hitting it all the time why didn’t they just make a normal game dude why did they have to render the individual dickhairs on every character,” wrote another.
Others have been clowning on people who may have gone out to try to secure a PS5 Pro specifically for GTA 6. “Congratulations to everyone who bought a PS5 Pro + OLED exclusively for GTA 6,” one wrote. “Your 30FPS will look absolutely gorgeous on that OLED.” Another person shared a screenshot of a refund request to Sony, claiming they’d actually returned the game over the news.
Yes, the number of NPCs, interactions, objects, physics and animations being simultaneously rendered here at 60fps is mind blowing. https://t.co/RVsZtK67o5 pic.twitter.com/p1yCopdzhv
— Nima (@nima02l) November 10, 2026
There’s been a lot of people debating the impact of 30 fps in the wake of the news. It’s worth pointing out that no modern Rockstar game has run at 60 fps at launch. But the last game it released was Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, before the modern era of 60 fps gaming on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Updated ports of its back catalog to those platforms have supported higher frame rates as a result. Others have also pointed out how quickly gamers have been to savage games from other developers that didn’t support 60 fps.
“No offense towards GTA 6 it will be good, but Starfield got assaulted for being locked to 30 fps and runs at 60 fps on Xbox and PS5 now, are we gonna have the same energy for GTA 6 being locked to 30 fps?” one person wrote on X (via IGN). “We do lock it at 30, because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff,” Starfield director Todd Howard said prior to the game’s release. “We don’t want to sacrifice any of it.” It did not go over well. Starfield has since received a 60 fps mode.
30 FPS gaming actually does matter for two reasons that are often used to absolve it from being an issue
Visual quality – 30 FPS gaming is blurrier on modern displays, and less fluid. This significantly reduces visual quality compared to higher frame rates, because it makes it… https://t.co/7PvLUVs2My
— Hardware Unboxed (@HardwareUnboxed) November 11, 2026
Not everyone is a 60 fps purist, especially for games that are intended to be graphical showpieces where moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t the main draw. GTA 6 is pitched as a stunning, immersive, narrative-driven open-world simulation of a couple’s journey through the criminal underworld in a fictional facsimile of Miami. Driving, shooting, and minigames are all a big part of that, but not necessarily in the same way that perfectly timed parries and dodges matter in a FromSoftware boss fight.
Here’s how The Order: 1886 game director Dana Jan defended 30 fps back in 2014. “60 fps is really responsive and really cool. I enjoy playing games in 60 fps,” he told Kotaku at the time. “But one thing that really changes is the aesthetic of the game in 60 fps. We’re going for this filmic look, so one thing that we knew immediately was films run at 24 fps. We’re gonna run at 30 because 24 fps does not feel good to play. So there’s one concession in terms of making it aesthetically pleasing, because it just has to feel good to play.”
I have no idea if the developers at Rockstar Games agree with that sentiment, or if 30 fps for GTA 6 is purely a technical limitation. I’m sure it will get a 60 fps mode at some point. If it’s anything like the studio’s past games, people will be playing it for the next decade. Will the lack of a 60 fps mode dramatically hold back the experience at launch? I doubt it.
