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

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 genuinely 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 genuinely fantastic, 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.

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 genuinely fights you across multiple grooves. That AI is the reason to own it.

The honest 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.

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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.

Topic: Sim Racing Games