Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-45051074-20200620005016/@comment-38952966-20200802225939

RetroScoob wrote: If GER can work without Giorno being conscious then sure he’d probably win, but if he doesn’t then that’s a whole different problem. In a situation that Pucci did a whole slit through Giorno’s head would mean possibly GER is no more and is gone during the time Pucci slit through giorno’s head, but most likely be a 1/100 chance since GER can return to zero anyways. But if you think about it all abilities have a limit, so there can be a few second apart before Giorno can use RTZ like Jotaro when he has to wait a few seconds before stopping time. So my decision is pretty much in the middle right now.

From what we can tell, there's only delay on GER if Giorno uses it manually, but it will activate automatically to protect Giorno. The automatic protection might imply that Giorno doesn't need to be conscious to use RtZ, but it doesn't matter anyway since the protection is automatic and you can't hurt Giorno anyway.