Grand Theft Auto VI

What to Upgrade First

GTA VI runs on RAGE 9, the next evolution of the engine behind GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2. Based on those games, expect GTA VI to be both GPU-bound and CPU-bound depending on the scenario. Dense urban areas with heavy NPC and vehicle traffic will hammer the CPU, while open vistas and ray-traced reflections will push the GPU.

If you already have a PC, start with your GPU. The jump from a GTX 1660 to an RTX 5060 is the single biggest improvement. But if you’re running an older quad-core CPU (i5-7600K, Ryzen 3 3300X), you’ll hit CPU bottlenecks in downtown Vice City — upgrade to at least a 6-core like the Ryzen 5 7600.

Storage matters more than usual. GTA V’s install was 95 GB at launch and grew past 120 GB with updates. GTA VI will likely land around 150 GB and grow with GTA Online content. Budget 2 TB if you don’t want to uninstall other games. An NVMe SSD is strongly recommended — RAGE 9 streams world data aggressively and an HDD will cause visible pop-in at driving speed.

The 8 GB VRAM on the budget tier’s RTX 5060 is tight for a game this large. If you can stretch to the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, the extra VRAM provides headroom for high-resolution textures and mods that will inevitably follow.