Will ARC Raiders Run on the Steam Machine?

Short answer: ARC Raiders should be playable on the Steam Machine, most likely at 1080p with FSR doing some of the heavy lifting — but treat that as an estimate, not a promise. We do not have a measured Steam Machine verdict for this title yet. This outlook is derived from the game's known demands and SteamOS/Proton compatibility, and we'll update it the moment we have hands-on numbers on the actual hardware.

ARC Raiders is Embark's PvPvE extraction shooter built on Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is the variable that makes us cautious. The engine's lighting and streaming systems are gorgeous and heavy, and how a game performs depends heavily on which UE5 features the developer leans on. ARC Raiders is comparatively well-optimized for a UE5 title, which works in the Machine's favor — but it is still a demanding online shooter, and the Steam Machine sits in the RX 7600 class with an 8 GB VRAM ceiling.

The anti-cheat question comes first

Before frame rates matter at all, an online competitive game has to actually launch on SteamOS. ARC Raiders uses anti-cheat, and anti-cheat is the single most common reason a multiplayer game is dead-on-arrival on Linux/Proton — not performance.

The good news: the major kernel-level and middleware anti-cheat vendors (EAC and BattlEye) both ship Proton-compatible modes, and developers have to actively enable that support. ARC Raiders has been reported as functional on SteamOS-class hardware through Proton, which is the prerequisite that matters. But anti-cheat status can change with any patch, in either direction. A game that runs today can be locked out tomorrow if the developer flips a setting, and vice versa.

What this means for you: anti-cheat compatibility is the first thing to verify on launch day, before you worry about settings. If it launches and you reach a match, you've cleared the hard part. See our methodology for how we treat online-game compatibility as a separate gate from performance.

What the RX 7600-class profile tells us

The Steam Machine's GPU lands roughly at RX 7600 / RTX 4060 level. That's a capable 1080p card and a competent 1440p-with-upscaling card in most modern titles. For ARC Raiders specifically, here's our honest read:

• 1080p high, no upscaling: Plausibly the comfortable target. A well-optimized UE5 shooter on RX 7600-class silicon usually lands in a playable range at 1080p. Estimated.
• 1080p with FSR Quality: This is where we'd expect the Machine to feel best — smoother frame pacing and headroom for the action-heavy moments. Estimated.
• 1440p: Possible with FSR Balanced/Performance, but expect to give up settings. Not a native-4K device — don't aim there.

The 8 GB VRAM ceiling is the thing to watch most closely. UE5 titles with high-resolution textures can push past 8 GB, and once you exceed it you get traversal stutter and frame-time spikes rather than a clean lower average. Texture quality is likely to be your most important single setting here. These are qualitative expectations from the hardware profile, not measured ARC Raiders numbers — we'll replace them with real figures once we've tested.

Concrete steps for launch day

If you're setting this up on your Steam Machine before we've published measured numbers, here's the practical order of operations:

1. Confirm it launches and connects. Get into an actual match. Anti-cheat first, everything else second.
2. Start at 1080p, not 1440p. Give yourself the easy baseline before you push resolution.
3. Set textures to High, not Ultra. Protect that 8 GB VRAM budget. Ultra textures are the most common cause of stutter on 8 GB cards.
4. Turn on FSR (Quality first). Use it to buy frame-pacing headroom, then decide if you want to spend that headroom on resolution or fidelity.
5. Cap your frame rate. A stable, capped frame rate feels better in an extraction shooter than a high but jittery one — consistency keeps your aim and your read on enemy movement honest.
6. Watch frame-time, not just FPS. In a game where one bad fight ends your run, a spike at the wrong moment costs you loot. Smoothness beats peak numbers.

For more on dialing in 8 GB-ceiling settings across titles, browse our /games library, and if you're still deciding on hardware, which device breaks down where the Steam Machine fits.

Should you buy it for the Steam Machine?

If you already want ARC Raiders and own the Machine, our current read is cautiously positive: a well-optimized UE5 shooter on RX 7600-class hardware is a reasonable bet at 1080p with FSR, assuming anti-cheat stays green on SteamOS. If you're buying specifically to play this and nothing else, we'd wait for our measured verdict — extraction shooters live or die on frame-time consistency, and that's exactly the kind of thing you can only confirm by playing on the actual box. Follow the page; we'll update with real numbers as soon as we've tested.