Limitation CPU equalized the Xbox Series S and PS5 Pro at 30 FPS in GTA 6

The gaming community has been actively discussing the fact that the Xbox Series S console and the flagship PlayStation 5 Pro will play Grand Theft Auto 6 at the same 30 FPS. The main technical reason lies in the hardware architecture of the central processing units (CPUs) of all modern gaming systems. The Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, base PlayStation 5, and enhanced PlayStation 5 Pro all use virtually the same 8-core, 16-thread processor based on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture. In the base PlayStation 5, the chip operates at a dynamic frequency of up to 3,5 GHz, while the PlayStation 5 Pro has a special mode with a 10% increase in clock speed, resulting in a figure of up to 3,85 GHz. In Microsoft’s consoles, the processor of the top-end Xbox Series X operates at a fixed frequency of 3,8 GHz without multithreading and 3,66 GHz with active multithreading. SMT, while in the younger Xbox Series S, these figures are 3,6 GHz and 3,4 GHz, respectively. The difference in clock speed between the weakest and most powerful versions is approximately 13%, completely eliminating the possibility of a significant leap in processor performance.

The performance limitations of Grand Theft Auto 6 are not limited by the graphics subsystem, but by the large-scale simulation of an open, interactive world. Highly detailed vehicle physics, dense traffic, complex NPC AI, and background script coordination are all handled entirely by the CPU. Since the logical calculations for world behavior occur independently of image resolution and scaling algorithms, simply lowering graphics settings or resolution on flagship consoles does nothing to break the 30 to 60 FPS barrier. The Zen 2 architecture’s processing power, under such a heavy background load, is physically sufficient to maintain a stable 30 FPS on any current-generation console.

The difference between the consoles will be apparent solely in visual quality and resolution stability, which are driven by the graphics chip. The flagship PlayStation 5 Pro features a 60-compute-unit (CU) GPU with a peak performance of 16,7 teraflops and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of 576 GB/s, enabling ray tracing and the intelligent PSSR upscaler. The base PlayStation 5 has 36 CUs with a peak performance of 10,28 teraflops and a memory bandwidth of 448 GB/s, while the Xbox Series X has 52 CUs with a peak performance of 12,15 teraflops and memory speeds of up to 560 GB/s. The entry-level Xbox Series S model is cut down to 20 compute units with 4 teraflops and memory bandwidth up to 224 GB/s, which means the project will run at a low base resolution with simplified visuals, but will maintain the same simulation level for all at 30 FPS.