Best racing games on the Steam Machine
Racing is built for a TV and a controller, and the Steam Machine has the GPU muscle for smooth 1080p/1440p laps. Our sim and arcade picks, TrackMania to ACC.
Racing might be the single most natural genre to fire up when you drop onto the couch in front of a TV. There is no keyboard to hunch over and no mouse to find room for — just a stick, two triggers, and an open road. The Steam Machine leans into exactly that: it is a SteamOS console built for the living room, it drives your TV directly, and its PS5-class graphics have plenty of headroom to make cars and tracks look sharp at 1080p and 1440p on the big screen.
That combination — controller in hand, feet up, a full grid rendered across the room — is arguably where racing games have always wanted to live.
Why racing belongs on the living-room TV
Racing is the rare PC genre that loses nothing when you move it off a desk. A gamepad's analog triggers map beautifully to throttle and brake, the left stick handles steering with fine control, and rumble gives you a genuine feel for grip breaking loose. Sitting further back from a large screen actually helps your sense of speed and spatial awareness through a corner, rather than hurting it.
SteamOS 3 boots into a console-style Big Picture interface, so you can go from cold start to a race without ever touching a mouse. For a genre that is all about pick-up-and-play sessions, that friction-free front end matters more than it sounds.
Racing is friendly to the Steam Machine's hardware
Here is the good news for anyone worried about a new box handling modern racers: this genre is one of the kindest on GPUs. Racing scenes are geometrically busy but predictable — a ribbon of track, a fixed number of cars, and a camera that mostly looks forward — so studios optimise them heavily for a locked, high frame rate. That is the opposite of an open-world game streaming an entire city.
The upshot is that the Steam Machine has room to spare here. Most racing titles target native 1080p or 1440p comfortably, and FSR is on hand to push toward 4K on a big TV when a game supports it. Because frame rate is the thing that actually matters for racing feel, this is a genre where the Machine's rasterisation strength — roughly six times a Steam Deck's — is spent exactly where it counts.
Arcade racers to break the ice
Start here if you want instant fun with friends on the couch. TrackMania is pure, distilled time-attack racing — no fuel, no damage, just you against a ghost lap on gloriously absurd stunt tracks, and it is featherweight enough that the Machine will never break a sweat.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is the definitive cops-and-racers power fantasy, all exotic cars and roadblocks, and it plays like it was designed for a pad from the start. Wreckfest turns destruction into a sport — banger racing with a superb soft-body damage model that is a riot in split screen or online. And Rocket League may technically be car-soccer, but it is one of the finest controller games ever made and a perpetual living-room crowd-pleaser.
We would nudge you to click through on each of these for our red / amber / green verdict rather than take our word in prose — but as a group, arcade racing is a natural fit for this hardware.
Sim racing for the big screen
If you want to feel every apex, the Machine has the muscle for serious simulation too. Assetto Corsa Competizione is the go-to for GT3 racing, with weather, tyre wear, and some of the best-modelled cars in the genre. RaceRoom Racing Experience is a free-to-start sim with an excellent driving model and a low barrier to entry, making it a smart first stop before you spend.
For loose surfaces, DiRT Rally remains a punishing, brilliant rally sim where a controller and a good sense of rhythm can genuinely get you down a stage. F1 2015 is an older, more accessible entry point into open-wheel racing if you want a lighter grand-prix experience. Sims lean a little harder on the hardware than arcade racers, so check each game's page for the exact verdict before you commit.
BeamNG.drive, the physics playground
BeamNG.drive sits in a category of its own — less a race and more a soft-body physics sandbox where crashes deform metal in real time and every vehicle behaves like a real, breakable machine. It is CPU-hungry when you pile cars into a demolition scenario, so it is the one title here we would most encourage you to check the verdict on. When it runs well, nothing else on the platform feels quite like it.
Wheels, pads, and Steam Input
Out of the box, the Steam Machine's controller (and any Steam-supported gamepad) works everywhere thanks to Steam Input, which maps and remaps buttons at the system level. That covers the vast majority of players and every game on this list.
If you own a racing wheel and pedal set, support depends on the individual title and its Proton compatibility rather than on the hardware — many popular wheels are recognised, but force-feedback behaviour varies from game to game. If wheel support is your deal-breaker, confirm it per title before buying, since this is the one area where sim racing on SteamOS still asks for a little homework.
How our verdicts work
A quick, important honesty note: SteamFPS ratings are derived from Steam's own compatibility and platform data, not from us physically benchmarking each game on the hardware. We do not publish invented frame-rate counts, and where we say a genre "runs comfortably" we mean it in that derived, general sense. For the exact per-game red / amber / green verdict, open the title's page — and if you want to know precisely how we reach each rating, read our methodology.
Where to go next
Racing is one of the best-served genres on this machine, blending a controller-first design with hardware that is naturally suited to the workload. Browse everything we have rated in the racing genre hub to see the full spread across sim and arcade, and check individual titles for their verdicts before you build your garage.