PS5 or Xbox Series X for GTA 6, and where Series S sits

Rockstar's shipping Grand Theft Auto 6 on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5 Pro and Xbox Series X and S on 19 November. If you're buying a console for this game, the honest headline is that the version you play will look and run very similarly on the two flagship machines.

Both are aiming for the same 30fps

GTA 6 is targeting 30 frames per second on consoles at launch, and Rockstar hasn't promised a 60fps performance mode on any of them. That reporting covers the PS5 Pro too.

That takes away the usual reason to pick a side. There's no 60fps machine and 30fps machine here. There's one target, and both boxes are expected to hit it. Our 30fps piece has the detail, and the Digital Foundry analysis covers what a console gives up to get there.

So frames don't decide this one. Money and storage do.

Where they really differ: the cost of space

This is the real gap between the two, and it isn't close.

A PlayStation 5 takes a standard M.2 NVMe drive, from a competitive market with a dozen manufacturers in it. An Xbox Series X or S takes a proprietary Storage Expansion Card that only two companies make under licence. It's the same job, and the Xbox route costs noticeably more per gigabyte because nobody's competing on price.

With a 200GB game on the way, that's a lot more than a footnote. Full detail on both, including the requirement most cheap PlayStation drives fail, is in the storage guide.

Series S runs it, with the least room to spare

Series S is a confirmed platform, so whether it runs the game isn't in question. It's the weakest of the four machines and it starts with the least room, which is a problem when the download's this size.

One thing that usually gets held against it doesn't apply here. Series S has no disc drive, and normally that rules out buying games in a box. For this release it makes no difference at all, because the physical edition holds a download code, not a disc. Everybody's downloading.

If Series S is the console you own, play it there. If you're choosing a machine specifically for this game, don't pick that one.

The PS5 Pro won't double your frame rate

The Pro has more graphics headroom than a base PS5. What it doesn't seem to have is a promised 60fps mode in this game, and the reporting's explicit that the Pro isn't exempt from the 30fps target.

That makes the Pro a poor purchase to make *for* GTA 6. It may well hold a cleaner image, and image quality's a real thing to want. But if you're buying one expecting the frame rate to double, that's not what's been promised.

So which one?

The one you already own. With the same performance target and no exclusive content on either side, switching ecosystems for this game costs you your friends list and your library, and you'd gain almost nothing back.

If you own neither and you're buying in, the PS5 is the cheaper machine to live with over the next few years, purely because expanding its storage costs less and will keep costing less.

Pre-order pricing and what separates the two editions is in the editions guide.