After spending more time with Valve’s Steam Machine, I keep coming back to the same question: when Grand Theft Auto 6 finally reaches PC, how well could it run on Valve’s compact mini gaming PC? That day is still a long way off, because Rockstar has not made PC players its first priority, but whenever GTA 6 does arrive on the platform, it’s almost certainly going to be one of the most demanding releases in years.
The skepticism around the Steam Machine is easy to understand. Its performance has been debated nonstop, and a lot of players look at the price and the fact that it often trails the PS5, then stop the conversation there. But Rockstar’s recent PC output tells a more interesting story. Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Enhanced Edition of Grand Theft Auto V have shown just how far scalability can carry a big-budget game. If GTA 6 follows that same philosophy on PC, the Steam Machine may have a better shot than its critics assume.
First, Rockstar Has to Bring GTA 6 to PC
Before anyone starts worrying about frame rates and graphics settings, there’s one obvious hurdle: Rockstar actually needs to release Grand Theft Auto 6 on PC. A PC version feels inevitable, but the company has made it clear that consoles come first. In a Bloomberg interview, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said Rockstar wants to focus on its core console audience before turning to PC.
That approach is hardly new for Rockstar, even if it remains frustrating for PC players. Still, with Take-Two openly acknowledging how significant the PC market has become, there’s at least some reason to hope the wait might not stretch quite as long as it has in the past.
Rockstar’s PC Ports Are Better at Scaling Than People Give Them Credit For
Rockstar’s history on PC has not been perfectly smooth. Grand Theft Auto 4 launched with plenty of headaches, and Games For Windows Live only made things worse with extra compatibility issues and messy performance. That rough reputation has lingered for years.
But more recent Rockstar games have been far better examples of how to build a PC version that can adapt to very different hardware. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a great example. It may not offer the cleanest preset structure for benchmarking, but it gives players a huge number of ways to tune image quality and performance. That flexibility matters much more in practice than a tidy menu layout. Rockstar’s use of Vulkan also helps, particularly for systems outside the usual Windows setup.
In fact, one of the biggest strengths of Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC is just how low you can push it if needed. It may not look pretty at that point, but the game becomes surprisingly accessible on weaker hardware. Low Spec Gamer even got it running on an 11th-gen Core i3 mobile chip from 2020, landing around 20 to 30 fps. That doesn’t mean the experience was ideal, but it does underline an important point: Rockstar knows how to make its games stretch across a wide range of systems.
That’s why the Steam Machine shouldn’t be dismissed outright. It may not be a powerhouse, but it’s also not so weak that a scalable Rockstar PC port would be out of the question.
Digital Foundry suggested recently that GTA 6 will probably target 30 fps on base consoles, based on what the trailers imply about CPU load, open-world complexity, and Rockstar’s usual preference for visual fidelity over performance. That feels plausible. But the PC version is a different conversation. Rockstar has a proven habit of handing players a long list of settings to tweak, and that flexibility could make all the difference on hardware like the Steam Machine.
In practice, the Steam Machine already handles Rockstar’s recent games better than some might expect. Red Dead Redemption 2 can run at 4K with FSR on Performance and a mix of medium, high, and ultra settings at a steady 65 fps. It doesn’t quite match the PS5 visually, but it runs smoothly. Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced also performs well on the high preset with ray tracing, landing in the 60 to 70 fps range depending on the area.
So yes, GTA 6 will almost certainly ask much more of the hardware. The trailers alone make that obvious. But the real concern may not be raw graphics horsepower. It may be the operating system.
SteamOS Could Be the Real Obstacle
If you check Grand Theft Auto 5 on Steam Deck, Steam Machine, or other Linux-based PCs, you’ll find it marked as unsupported. That label is not the full story. The game itself can run on SteamOS, but only if your focus is the single-player side.
The bigger issue is GTA Online. Rockstar uses BattlEye Anti-Cheat there, and that creates problems for SteamOS because of its kernel-level requirements. In theory, a company with Rockstar’s resources could pursue a Linux-friendly solution or workaround. In reality, that seems unlikely to be a major priority, especially when Rockstar has already made clear that consoles remain its central focus.
That’s the difficult truth for Linux gaming in general. It has improved dramatically, but it is still a small slice of the PC market. According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, Linux accounts for 3.9% of Steam’s install base. That is enough to show meaningful growth, but perhaps not enough to push a publisher like Rockstar into rethinking its anti-cheat approach.
So, Would GTA 6 Run on the Steam Machine?
Most likely, yes—eventually. Based on how scalable Rockstar’s recent PC games have been, there’s good reason to believe Grand Theft Auto 6 could be made to run on the Steam Machine in some form. The more likely compromise is that it would require reduced settings and deliver an experience that looks less impressive than what consoles can offer.
The bigger limitation is probably not whether the campaign can run, but whether the full package can. If Rockstar sticks with anti-cheat choices that remain unfriendly to SteamOS, then Valve’s small PC may end up being a perfectly viable machine for GTA 6’s single-player mode while still falling short as a home for its online component.
Jacqueline Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN. You can follow her @Jackiecobra.