The Best Sim Racing PC Games of 2026

Here’s where the major PC sims stand in mid-2026. Assetto Corsa EVO is up to Update 0.7, iRacing has just rolled out its 2026 Season 3 build, Le Mans Ultimate shipped a 2026 WEC season update in time for the real Le Mans, and Assetto Corsa Rally added laser-scanned Rally Greece. Below is what each one is best at, what’s new, and – because I race in a headset most days – how each one fares in VR.

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Which sim should I play? | Assetto Corsa EVO | Assetto Corsa | Assetto Corsa Competizione | Automobilista 2 | Assetto Corsa Rally | NASCAR 25 | iRacing | Le Mans Ultimate | BeamNG.drive | rFactor 2 | RaceRoom | Richard Burns Rally | Also worth knowing

Which sim should I play? A quick comparison

Before the deep dives, here’s the whole field at a glance – what each sim is for, how beginner-friendly it is, how you pay, where the online racing lives, and its current VR maturity. If VR is your main interest, my VR sim racing games guide goes deeper on which titles are worth the headset.

VR maturity reflects mid-2026 native support and real-world performance. “Workable” means good once you tune it; “Excellent” means it just works.

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Assetto Corsa EVO

Compatibility: PC (Steam Early Access)
Release: Early Access launched January 2025 | full v1.0 now expected Summer 2026

Update 0.7 arrived in June 2026, adding more cars, a new particle system and – the big one for the community – the first official modding SDK. EVO runs on a brand-new proprietary Kunos engine rather than a licensed one, and it shows: full physically-based materials, dynamic weather, and a level of visual polish nothing else touches. The pitch is a hybrid – the laser-scanned, hardcore side of ACC fused with the road-car and open-world appeal of the original AC. The tyre model and handling have drawn steady praise since launch.

It’s still Early Access, so temper expectations. The planned career mode was dropped earlier in 2026, which annoyed a chunk of the community, and content has rolled out slower than people hoped. The daily multiplayer with its own EVO safety rating is coming together nicely, though, and the long-promised Eifel open-world free-roam is pencilled in for late 2026. Full v1.0 isn’t expected before the summer.

In VR: workable, but demanding. Native OpenXR and SteamVR are both there, and Update 0.7 added FSR3 and an OpenXR turbo mode, but even a 4090 or 5090 has to drop settings to hold a steady framerate. It’s the best-looking headset experience on paper and the hardest to run in practice. If you’re setting it up, my Assetto Corsa VR settings guide shares the same OpenXR approach that helps here.

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Assetto Corsa

Compatibility: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Ultimate Edition RRP: around £32 / $55 (frequently discounted)

Even with EVO out, the original AC refuses to die – and in 2026 it’s kept alive almost entirely by mods. The modern stack is three pieces: Content Manager to run everything, Custom Shaders Patch for the graphics engine, and Pure, which has now fully replaced the old Sol mod as the definitive weather and lighting layer. Set that up and a 2014 sim looks strikingly current.

What keeps it essential is the sheer sandbox freedom. Name a car, a track, a touge pass or a stretch of motorway traffic and someone has built it in AC. It’s the undisputed home of cruising, drifting and offline messing about, and the best value in sim racing once you’re past the slightly intimidating first hour of installing mods. My best Assetto Corsa mods guide is the shortcut through that.

In VR: excellent, and arguably the best in the business. Because the base engine is so light, modern hardware runs it at big supersampled resolutions with headroom to spare – a lot of people still rate CSP-and-Pure AC as the best-looking VR sim you can run in 2026. For peak frames on a Quest 3 or Pimax, bypass SteamVR with OpenComposite and VDXR. My Assetto Corsa VR settings walk through exactly that.

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Assetto Corsa Competizione

Compatibility: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S
Ultimate Edition RRP: around £100 / $119 (all DLC included)

ACC does one thing and does it better than anyone: GT3, GT4 and GT2 racing under the SRO banner. Deeper telemetry, a superb tyre model and, to my ears, the best audio in the genre. It has effectively reached the end of its content life now – Kunos have shifted to EVO, and the last real update was the 2025 season pass in December 2025 (new liveries, no new cars or tracks) – but the racing on offer is still among the best you’ll find anywhere.

Two things worth knowing before you dive in. The Unreal Engine 4 visuals are starting to show their age against EVO, and the public lobbies are chaotic – the community consensus in 2026 is that Low Fuel Motorsport (LFM) is the way in for clean, serious daily racing, not the in-game matchmaking. Set that up and it’s still a phenomenal GT sim.

In VR: good on current hardware, though it’s always been heavy. UE4’s deferred rendering gave it a rough VR reputation, but a modern GPU with DLSS and an OpenXR toolkit brute-forces it into looking great. One 2026 patch introduced a VR performance regression for some; the community fix is deleting the dynamic.cache shader file to restore smooth frames. My full ACC setup guide covers the rest.

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Automobilista 2

Compatibility: PC and Linux
RRP: around £35 / $40 on Steam

If I want to show someone why sim racing is brilliant, I load AMS2. Reiza’s Madness-engine sim has the widest, weirdest, most joyful roster in the genre – Super Trucks, Group C prototypes, historic single-seaters, era-accurate classic seasons – wrapped in the best dynamic weather and day-to-night transitions going. It’s the ultimate hop-in-and-drive sim, with force feedback that’s superb, and Reiza have kept quietly closing the physics gap to the top tier update by update. The current build is in the v1.6.9 series (mid-2026), with a big v1.7 and a long-awaited career mode on the 2026 roadmap.

One thing to flag for new buyers: a licensing impasse in mid-2026 forced Reiza to swap the official modern F1-style cars for generic formulas. The driving is unaffected, but if you were buying it for the licensed grid specifically, check what’s current before you pay. Multiplayer also remains a secondary priority here – this is a single-player and hot-lapping sim first.

In VR: excellent – the king of PC VR optimisation, still. Native, plug-and-play, and it looks stunning while holding 90fps-plus even on mid-range hardware. If you’ve just bought a headset and want a sim that simply works in it, this is the one. See my AMS2 beginner’s setup guide to get going.

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Assetto Corsa Rally

Compatibility: PC
RRP: around £25 (Early Access)
Release: Steam Early Access, November 2025

This is the standalone rally title from Supernova Games, built in technical partnership with Kunos, and it has quietly become the rally sim to watch. It takes Kunos-derived tarmac and gravel physics and drops them onto point-to-point, laser-scanned stages in Unreal Engine 5. The handling is the headline – hardcore reviewers reckon it already out-drives both Richard Burns Rally and EA Sports WRC on pure surface feel, which is about the biggest compliment you can pay a rally sim.

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The v0.5 update in mid-2026 added Rally Greece with two beautifully detailed gravel stages, and the car list is slowly filling out. It’s still Early Access, so the content is thin – around ten licensed cars and a handful of stages – and it leans on a strong PC to run the UE5 laser-scanned roads well. Kunos and Supernova clearly chose depth over volume. If you value how a rally car feels over how much there is to drive, that’s the right call.

In VR: none yet. As of the v0.5 build there’s no native VR support – only experimental UEVR mods with no proper head-tracking – so treat this one as flat-screen for now. Native VR would transform it, and it’s the feature I’m most hoping lands before v1.0.

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NASCAR 25

Compatibility: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S
Release: PC via Steam, November 2025

Built by iRacing Studios on Unreal Engine 5, NASCAR 25 packages iRacing’s stock-car physics and AI into a proper standalone game – all four national series (Cup, Xfinity, Truck, ARCA) with a career mode fronted by Dale Earnhardt Jr. It’s a night-and-day improvement over the disastrous NASCAR 21: Ignition era, and the AI properly fights you across multiple grooves. That AI is the reason to own it.

The real picture in 2026: development has essentially moved on to NASCAR 26, already confirmed for the autumn. PC player counts are low, and the career leaves immersion on the table – no manual pit stops, no post-race burnouts, shallow team management. It still feels a bit like a delayed console port. Worth it for the offline racing against that AI; less so if you want a busy online scene.

In VR: none – iRacing Studios have confirmed NASCAR 25 supports neither VR headsets nor native triple screens. If you want stock cars in a headset, that lives on the main iRacing service, not here.

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iRacing

Compatibility: PC
RRP: around $13/month or $110/year (cars and tracks bought separately)
Release: 2008, continuously updated

There’s no way around it – iRacing is the benchmark for competitive online sim racing and has been for years. The subscription-then-buy-content model puts some people off, but nothing else offers hourly, populated, properly matchmade races across road, oval and dirt. The iRating and Safety Rating system sorts you into splits with drivers of similar pace, so even your first few official races feel like real competition. Real NASCAR, IndyCar and F1 pros race on it, which tells you plenty.

The 2026 Season 3 build landed in June with a fresh street circuit, a rescanned Laguna Seca and new machinery, on top of Dirt Oval AI, UI upgrades, a built-in fuel calculator and the steadily expanding Tempest rain system. Eighteen years in and it still ships meaningful content every quarter. The two gripes worth knowing: it’s CPU-bound on the current engine (an overhaul is on the roadmap), and being asked to re-buy the rescanned Laguna Seca annoyed a lot of people.

In VR: good, though CPU-bound. iRacing runs OpenXR natively and, unusually, supports eye-tracked Dynamic Foveated Rendering out of the box, so it’s exceptionally clean to set up. The catch is that rain on a big grid can bring even a 9800X3D to its knees without DFR enabled. My iRacing VR settings guide has my baseline for Pimax, Quest 3 and PSVR2.

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Le Mans Ultimate

Compatibility: PC (Steam)
RRP: around £30 / $40 (no subscription)

Le Mans Ultimate has matured out of its rocky Early Access start into the definitive endurance sim. It inherits rFactor 2’s physics and pours them into the WEC’s multi-class format – Hypercars, LMP2 and GT3s sharing a track – with force feedback and a tyre model that a lot of drivers, me included, rate above iRacing’s. The v1.3.3 “2026 Season Update” dropped in June, right before the real 24 Hours of Le Mans, with the full 2026 WEC liveries, updated Hypercars and a new LMP3. Earlier in the year it added the European Le Mans Series and a free Genesis Hypercar.

It’s not subscription-based – a straight upfront price – and RaceControl handles ranked daily and weekly races with driver swaps and team management. Jimmy Broadbent called it “far more accessible than iRacing… a good place to start before dishing out tons of money.” The gripes are the familiar ones: UI bugs, occasional server wobble, and heavy system requirements. But the roadmap – co-op, IMSA and Asian Le Mans, a career mode, an eventual console port – is exactly what you’d want.

In VR: workable, and improving fast. The v1.3 update embedded OpenComposite directly into the game to streamline the OpenXR pipeline, and pit-garage occlusion culling helped performance. Studio 397 still class the VR as “alpha”, though, and a full 44-car ELMS grid will stutter without a strong GPU. My Le Mans Ultimate beginner’s guide is the place to start.

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BeamNG.drive

Compatibility: PC (PS5 port arriving in 2026)
RRP: around £19

BeamNG is the odd one out here, and all the better for it. Its bespoke soft-body physics simulate every node and beam in a car’s chassis in real time – bend a control arm or twist an A-pillar and the handling changes permanently for the rest of the run. Nothing else models damage like it. It’s beloved for sandbox freedom, an enormous mod scene and crash fidelity that ranges from careful rock-crawling to full-speed police chases.

2026 is a big year for it. BeamNG is officially coming to PS5, running its complex physics at 2 kHz on console, and the developers have finally confirmed that official multiplayer is in active development – the one thing the community has always wanted. A large v0.39 update with a graphics and engine overhaul is due later in the year. Out of the box it still lacks structured career or racing modes, and it’s heavy on hardware, but as a physics playground nothing comes close.

In VR: workable but experimental. OpenXR and Vulkan VR are supported and it’s wonderful for immersive cruising or teaching someone clutch control, but it’s unoptimised – even a high-end rig often has to drop settings hard – and a high-speed crash in a headset is a fast route to motion sickness. My BeamNG.drive guide has more.

rFactor 2

Compatibility: PC (Steam)
Release: 2017, still updated – now under Motorsport Games / Studio 397

For years rFactor 2 held the crown for the best force feedback in sim racing, and plenty of drivers would tell you it still does. The physics and the FFB are the draw here – the way a car communicates the road surface and the edge of grip through the wheel is a benchmark others get measured against. Pair it with a decent direct drive base and you understand quickly why it kept a hardcore following long after it stopped being the newest thing on the block. The laser-scanned tracks and the huge span of car classes, from open-wheelers to GT to endurance prototypes, back that up.

The picture in 2026 is that active development has wound down in favour of Le Mans Ultimate, which is built on the same underlying tech. rFactor 2 still gets minor housekeeping updates – a Grid Finder integration landed in May 2026 – but the big pushes now go into LMU. So think of it as a mature, deep sim with a settled community rather than one that’s growing. The UI has always been its weak point, and getting set up takes more patience than a modern title. Get past that and the driving is as good as this hobby offers.

In VR: supported and good – rFactor 2 has solid native VR, and running its FFB in a headset on a proper wheel is one of the more convincing sim experiences you can put together on PC.

RaceRoom Racing Experience

Compatibility: PC (Steam)
Release: free-to-play, actively updated – Summer Update landed August 2026

RaceRoom is the sim that too many people skip, and it deserves better. It’s free to download – you buy the cars and tracks you want rather than one big box price – which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether serious sim racing is for you. It’s also the official DTM game, so if touring cars and modern GT3 are your thing, this is home. The sound design is a standout too; the engine notes are some of the best in the genre, and the driving model is more approachable than rFactor 2 or ACC without feeling dumbed down.

Far from being a museum piece, it’s had a busy 2026. The August Summer Update brought a DTM 2026 car pack – the Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo, Ford Mustang GT3 Evo, Lamborghini Temerario GT3 and Porsche 911 GT3 R Evo – a fresh Nürburgring Nordschleife to current spec, and a modernised HUD. For a free game that’s a lot of current content, and it makes RaceRoom an easy recommendation for a beginner who wants to try before spending, or a veteran after cracking DTM racing.

In VR: supported. It works well in a headset, and given the free entry point it’s a low-risk way to see whether VR sim racing clicks for you before you commit money to a paid title.

Richard Burns Rally

Compatibility: PC
Release: 2004 – kept current by the Rallysimfans (RSF) community mod

Yes, a game from 2004 belongs on a 2026 list, and rally drivers won’t blink at that. Richard Burns Rally has a rally physics model that a lot of serious co-drivers and stage racers still consider the best ever made – the way weight transfers on a loose surface, the way you have to place the car and commit to a line long before the corner, is something newer rally games are only now catching up to. It’s the benchmark the discipline measures itself against.

What keeps it alive is the Rallysimfans (RSF) mod, a community project that has effectively rebuilt the game around the old core – hundreds of stages, a huge car roster, modern online rallies and leaderboards, and an installer that sorts most of the old compatibility headaches for you. It’s free, and it’s the reason a two-decade-old game still runs weekly events in 2026. Be warned though: this is the deep end. There’s no hand-holding and the learning curve is vertical. If you want the purest rally driving on PC and you’re willing to work for it, nothing else quite matches it.

In VR: possible through the RSF community’s VR support – not the cleanest setup on this list, but rally in a headset, staring down a stage you can’t see the end of, is worth the fiddling.

Two more worth knowing

Two titles don’t need a full section but shouldn’t go unmentioned, because both are alive and being worked on in 2026 and both fill a specific niche the big names don’t.

Kart Racing Pro

If you want to learn car control from the ground up, karting is where real drivers start, and Kart Racing Pro is the pure kart sim on PC. PiBoSo’s long-running project models the twitchy, direct, no-downforce feel of a kart better than anything else, and with KartKraft now abandoned it’s left as the standout in its niche. It’s spartan and demanding, but for learning throttle control and racecraft in their rawest form there’s nothing else like it.

Live For Speed

Live For Speed is one of the oldest online sims still standing, and it has never fully gone away thanks to a famously tight netcode and a loyal racing community. What’s notable in 2026 is that it’s not resting on that history – the long-awaited “Big Update” is out on a public test branch, bringing a new graphics engine, dynamic lighting, a day/night cycle, multithreading and a 1000Hz physics rate. For a game this old to get that kind of technical overhaul is remarkable, and it’s worth a look if you want lightweight, close online racing that runs on almost any PC.

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Build the rest of the rig

The right sim is only half of it – the hardware to run them properly matters as much, and if you race in a headset, so does the right VR guide. Start here: VR sim racing games in 2026, the best VR headsets for sim racing, the gaming PC buyer’s guide, the GPU buyer’s guide, the direct drive wheels buyer’s guide, and iRacing promo codes for new members.