It's the question on everyone's lips – when are we next going to get a glimpse of GTA 6? It's been months and months since the last trailer dropped, but there's still a long time to go before the game is ready to actually come out in May 2026, so Rockstar will have to give us more to digest soon, right?
Well, there's really no guarantee there at all, but I've been thinking about the huge upcoming blockbuster in light of what I've played so far this year, and one of the conclusions I'm increasingly drawing is really surprising to me. I've been playing on PC more and more this year, with an RTX 5070 Ti to rely on, and it's made performance more of an interest in new games.
If I scroll through the new games I've played in recent months, one has stood out for its technical optimisation – Battlefield 6, which runs like butter on a wide range of machines, and is particularly handsome on its highest settings. Its team made the impressive decision to ignore ray-traced lighting, sticking with older techniques to leave more headroom for reactivity and destructible environments in its maps, and that approach has paid dividends.
The game looks stunning, and while its PC performance is super impressive, it's on consoles that the benefits shine – especially given GTA 6 won't even hit PC at launch. On consoles, Battlefield 6 is a 60fps title by default, with no mode that drops this down to 30fps, and it also includes an unlocked performance mode that gets you more like 80-90fps even in big multiplayer games.
That means everyone gets smooth 60fps gameplay as the floor of the possibilities, and makes for a current-gen title that really feels superb to play, at the same time as looking and sounding great. From what we've seen of GTA 6, it might be an envelope-pusher in terms of visuals, but if all that comes at the expense of running at 30fps, I worry that it just won't feel that great to play.
Indeed, with its release date now in mid-2026, one could start to suspect that Rockstar's plan involves an inevitable upgraded version of the game on PlayStation 6 and whatever device is next for Xbox, allowing players to enjoy the game more smoothly. This would also be a repeat of how GTA 5 worked, releasing on PS3 and Xbox 360 before coming out again in a markedly better state on PS4 and Xbox One consoles.
Remembering the ropiness of those first GTA 5 versions, if GTA 6 releases in 2026 and doesn't have 60fps performance even on PS5 Pro, I'll count myself sorely disappointed.
This console generation has been solid in my opinion, but it's fair to say that it hasn't delivered consistently smooth frame rates without upscaling and other wizardry to make things look like they're rendering in 4K, and the same goes for expensive techniques like ray-traced lighting. Battlefield 6 has demonstrated that players might be more interested in smoothness and playability than the most bleeding-edge technical options, and I'll basically be super interested to see how Rockstar's approach firms up next year.
