Now that I’ve spent more time with the Steam Machine, I can’t stop myself from looking at Grand Theft Auto 6 looming on the horizon and thinking about how it’d theoretically run on Valve’s new mini gaming PC. Now, of course, it’s going to be a year or two before Rockstar deigns to grace PC gamers with GTA 6, but once it does, it’ll probably be an incredibly demanding PC game.
Since the Steam Machine came out, its performance has been, well, heavily discussed online, to say the least. It’s not hard to see why some folks are skeptical of Valve’s little PC – it does cost $1049 to start and is slightly slower than the PS5 most of the time. In spite of that, though, Rockstar’s last couple of PC launches, namely Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Enhanced Edition of Grand Theft Auto V, have been monuments to the scalability of PC games. So the Steam Machine might be more capable of handling everyone’s favorite crime simulator better than you might think.
GTA 6 Needs to Be On PC First
Now before the Steam Machine even has a chance of running Grand Theft Auto 6, Rockstar actually has to release it on PC. It’s basically inevitable that a PC version will eventually come out, but, according to a Bloomberg interview with Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, Rockstar instead wants to focus on its core audience – whatever that means – on consoles before releasing a PC version.
This isn’t new, GTA 5 didn’t come out on PC until 2015, two years after it launched on PS3 and Xbox 360, and Red Dead Redemption 2 had a similar gap. But even in the eight years since Red Dead 2, PC gaming has exploded in popularity to the point where Zelnick himself admitted in that same interview with Bloomberg that PC can make up around 50% of a game’s sales these days.
Maybe Rockstar is just stuck in its ways a bit, but at least with Zelnick recognizing the huge market of PC gamers out there, maybe we won’t have to wait a year and a half for a PC port. Maybe, it’ll just be a year instead. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.
It’s All About Scalability
Modern Rockstar games have a bit of a weird history with their PC ports. Grand Theft Auto 4 was an absolute nightmare when it came out, but mostly because it required the dreaded Games For Windows Live – which caused performance problems, compatibility issues, and god forbid you ever try to run it on a second machine.
But in the years since, Rockstar’s games have gotten so much better on PC. While I personally find it annoying that Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t have any strictly defined graphics presets, that’s really only a problem for testing hardware. Thankfully, for actually tuning the game to run on a wide variety of hardware, Rockstar threw in all kinds of graphics options that make it one of the most scalable games out there right now. Plus, the company embraced the Vulkan engine, which also helps it scale, especially outside of Windows 11.
You can, if you want, make Red Dead Redemption 2 look like absolute garbage. That doesn’t sound appealing right off the bat, but it also means that you can get it to run on pretty much anything. Low Spec Gamer, for instance, was able to get it to run on an 11th-gen Core i3 mobile chip from 2020, albeit at around 20-30 fps. For all the talk about the Steam Machine being underpowered, it’s not that underpowered.
Just a couple days ago, Digital Foundry suggested that, based on the trailers we’ve seen so far for GTA 6, the game will probably run at 30 fps on the base consoles, due to the CPU demand of the open world and Rockstar’s preference to lean more towards quality than performance in its console releases. I don’t think that’s wrong, but once the PC version is out there, Rockstar has a track record of giving gamers a lot of knobs to adjust how the game looks and performs.
Running Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4K with FSR set to Performance, and all the settings mixed between medium, high and ultra, the Steam Machine gets a solid 65 fps. It does look a bit worse than the PS5 version does, but it runs very smoothly on Valve’s PC. Grand Theft Auto 5’s Enhanced Edition also runs really well on the high preset with ray tracing, getting around 60-70 fps depending on where I am.
GTA 6 is going to be more demanding, for sure – just look at the trailer – but I don’t think the Steam Machine’s problem is going to be a graphics problem. The Steam Machine’s problem is probably going to be a SteamOS problem, especially if you want to play GTA Online.
Anti-Cheat, The Bane of SteamOS
Right now, if you look at Grand Theft Auto 5 on the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine, or really any other PC that’s running Linux, you’ll see a big ol’ banner telling you that it’s unsupported. That’s a bit misleading, the game will absolutely run on SteamOS, but only if you want to play the story mode.
GTA Online, which is certainly not going anywhere once GTA 6 launches, uses BattlEye Anti-Cheat, and that doesn’t play well with SteamOS because it needs kernel access. Now, Rockstar could, with its vast resources, probably get a workaround that runs on Linux. But, remember, this is the same company that says its core audience is console gamers. Even when the PC version inevitably comes out, I just don’t see Rockstar paying much mind to SteamOS compatibility issues.
Because no matter how great gaming on Linux has grown over the last few years, it’s still a very small segment of PC gamers. According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, Linux makes up for just 3.9% of Steam’s install base. That’s admittedly more than macOS, but I don’t think it’ll be enough to convince Rockstar to change its Anti-Cheat service of choice.
There will come a time when GTA 6 runs on the Steam Machine – I don’t think there’s really a question of whether or not the game will work. However, Valve’s little PC will probably only be able to run the single-player campaign, and at graphics settings that might make it look a bit worse than its console counterparts.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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