IRacing

IRacing
Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations LLC
Publisher	iRacing.com
Platform	Oculus Rift (Platform), OpenVR, OpenXR
Device	DK1, Oculus Rift DK2, Oculus Rift CV1, HTC Vive, Valve Index, Meta Quest 3, PlayStation VR2, Apple Vision Pro
Operating System	Windows
Type	Full Game
Genre	Simulation, Racing
Input Device	Mouse, Gamepad, Other
Play Area	Seated
Game Mode	Single Player, Multi-Player
Release Date	August 26, 2008
Price	Subscription membership
App Store	Oculus Share, Steam
Website	https://www.iracing.com

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

iRacing is an online motorsport racing simulation for Windows PCs, developed and published by iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations and sold as a subscription membership. Its servers went live to the public on 26 August 2008. iRacing is a VR App for the Oculus Rift (Platform) and other PC VR headsets. The company describes it as the first racing sim to support VR, in 2013, and it now runs in VR through three display modes: OpenXR, OpenVR and Oculus.

VR support in iRacing began with the Oculus Rift DK1 and was later extended to the Oculus Rift DK2, the consumer Oculus Rift CV1, the HTC Vive through OpenVR, and headsets that use OpenXR. Later builds added fixed and eye-tracked foveated rendering, and in May 2026 iRacing released a streaming client for Apple Vision Pro built on NVIDIA CloudXR.

Reviewed 29 September 2026. Public launch date, founders, Windows-only support, Steam release, features and system requirements, membership and content prices, license and AI racing details, VR support history from DK1 to OpenXR and foveated rendering, the listed headsets, the Apple Vision Pro client and its requirements, eNASCAR figures and the Metacritic score, each checked against its cited source. About review dates.

Features

iRacing is built around organized online racing. Members race in official series, and the service advertises races every day from series such as NASCAR, World of Outlaws and IMSA. Progress is governed by a license system. Every driver starts with a Rookie license and can move up to classes D, C, B and A and then to a Pro license; the license class determines which series a driver may enter. A separate Safety Rating starts at 2.5 and falls with incidents such as going off track, spinning or making contact, and rises with clean laps. Separate Road and Oval licenses are tracked.

iRacing says it has recreated every track in its roster using laser scanning; its membership page describes the tracks as millimeter accurate and lists more than 180 licensed and laser-scanned race cars. According to the company, laser scanning reproduces surface details such as cracks, camber and undulations, and race data including driving patterns, weather and tire setups is applied back to the track surface in real time.

The service was originally built for online competition. AI Racing now lets members race single events or full championship seasons against computer-controlled drivers, or add AI drivers to hosted and league races. iRacing dates AI hosted events to its 2021 Season 4 build. A roster can hold up to 60 AI opponents, and AI races do not affect a driver's iRating or Safety Rating. The Steam store lists single-player, multiplayer, online PvP, online co-op and VR support among the game's features, with partial controller support.

Virtual reality

VR is optional in iRacing and is selected as a display mode. The company's VR page lists 3D spatial audio that follows head movement, eye tracking on supported headsets, dynamic foveated rendering where supported, and graphics settings kept separately for VR and monitor play. As of 29 September 2026 the page names these headsets among those supported:

Maker	Headsets listed by iRacing
Pimax	Pimax Crystal Light, Crystal Super (several variants), Pimax Dream Air
Apple	Apple Vision Pro
Meta	Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3S
Valve	Valve Index; Steam Frame listed as "coming soon"
Bigscreen	Bigscreen Beyond, Bigscreen Beyond 2, Bigscreen Beyond 2e
Sony	PlayStation VR2
HTC	HTC Vive Pro 2
HP	HP Reverb G2

iRacing's support documentation calls OpenXR "the newest and most universally supported display mode"; the Oculus mode is the older standard, and OpenVR may be needed for some third-party community tools.

Development

iRacing was founded by Dave Kaemmer and John Henry. Kaemmer had co-founded Papyrus Design Group, the studio behind Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (1989), NASCAR Racing (1994) and Grand Prix Legends (1998); the company's ownership page describes Henry as principal owner of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club. In a July 2016 statement for the service's eighth anniversary, Kaemmer said that "iRacing was built for what has come to be known as eSports." The company then reported more than 225,000 members in more than 150 countries. By September 2026 its membership page invited visitors to join "more than 350,000 sim racers".

VR support history

iRacing supported the Oculus Rift DK1 before DK2 support arrived. Road to VR reported that Oculus used iRacing to demonstrate the Rift at events after the HD prototype was announced. The same report said players generally rated the DK1 support well, but found the first development kit's resolution too low to replace a monitor for everyday racing. The 2013 Season 4 release notes, published on 22 October 2013, updated the Rift integration to a newer Oculus SDK and added a "simplistic neck/head model" so that the eye positions followed the tracked head orientation.

The 2014 Season 4 update added DK2 support using Oculus SDK 0.4.2. It supported the headset's orientation sensors with a simulated neck model and drew the 3D interface about three quarters of a meter from the viewer, but positional tracking was still in development. iRacing recommended running the DK2 as an extended desktop monitor rather than in direct mode, which it said crashed on many PC configurations, especially those with multiple GPUs.

Support for the consumer Rift CV1 came with the quarterly update that began on 7 June 2016. Kevin Bobbitt, iRacing's director of marketing, called the game "one of the first titles to support the Oculus Rift DK1." For this release the VR code was moved from the old DirectX 9 renderer into the new DirectX 11 engine. Software engineer Shawn Nash told Road to VR that this "was a large rewrite". In Road to VR's hands-on on an Intel i7 4790K PC with a GTX 980, the game held 90 fps in most racing situations, and Asynchronous Timewarp smoothed occasional drops. The reviewer noted aliasing and a steering-arm animation limited to 180 degrees of rotation.

HTC Vive support followed through OpenVR. Before it arrived, the Revive injector used to run Rift titles on the Vive did not work with iRacing because of conflicts with the game's EasyAntiCheat software. Nash noted that because OpenVR also supports the Rift, Rift owners could choose either the Oculus SDK or the OpenVR SDK. The 2016 Season 4 release notes, dated 2 September 2016, announced "OpenVR / HTC Vive support has been enabled!" and turned on anti-aliasing for both Rift and OpenVR headsets.

Native OpenXR support was added in the 2022 Season 3 Patch 2 Hotfix 1 release of 6 July 2022, alongside the existing Oculus and OpenVR modes. The OpenXR option only appears when the active OpenXR runtime on the PC reports that it is compatible with the connected headset. iRacing recommended the Oculus runtime for Oculus headsets, the Windows Mixed Reality runtime (with SteamVR as a fallback) for WMR headsets, and the SteamVR runtime for the Valve Index and others.

The 2025 Season 3 build added quad-view fixed foveated rendering for OpenXR headsets on NVIDIA RTX 2000 series or newer GPUs. It renders each eye at a lower resolution plus a higher-resolution inset in the middle of each eye. The 2025 Season 4 release notes of 8 September 2025 extended this to dynamic foveated rendering, which moves the high-resolution inset to wherever each eye is looking, for OpenXR devices that support the XR_EXT_eye_gaze_interaction extension. The notes add that the SteamVR runtime does not handle eye tracking properly for some headsets, so Pimax and Varjo users should select those vendors' OpenXR runtimes. In OverTake's tests on a Pimax Crystal Super and a PlayStation VR2 (with eye tracking enabled on PC through a community mod), turning the features on raised frame rates in most scenarios; the PSVR2 reached 120 fps and stayed there for a session at Okayama, but night racing at Daytona still dropped it into the 70s.

Apple Vision Pro

Official Apple Vision Pro support was announced at GDC 2026 and uses NVIDIA CloudXR to stream the game from a PC. UploadVR reported that it relies on the foveated streaming feature Apple added in visionOS 26.4, can stream from a local or cloud PC, overlays physical wheels and pedals onto the virtual cockpit, and that CloudXR streaming runs at up to 120 fps on the M5 Vision Pro. The iRacing Connect app became available on the App Store on 11 May 2026 and requires visionOS 26.4 or later. iRacing says the app aligns a physical steering wheel with the in-game one so that drivers see their own hands on the wheel. It is a free download, and the company's support page credits the headset's passthrough for showing the driver's actual arms and hands.

The simulation still runs on a Windows PC. iRacing's requirements for the Vision Pro client are a PC meeting its high-end specification with an NVIDIA 4070 Ti or 5070 Ti graphics card or better (driver 580 or later), a Wi-Fi 6 or newer router capable of more than 1000 Mbps on the 5 GHz band, and a 5 GHz Wi-Fi adapter or Gigabit Ethernet connection on the PC. The company notes that calibration can suffer with insufficient room lighting, when the driver wears gloves or wristbands, or when the wheel has white grip tape that the cameras may confuse with hands.

Release

iRacing's servers went live to the public on 26 August 2008. It has been sold on Steam since 12 January 2015; accounts bought directly on iRacing.com cannot be renewed through Steam. It runs only on Windows 10 and 11; macOS is not supported, though Mac owners can install Windows with Boot Camp, and the simulation does not run on consoles.

Milestone	Date
Public launch	26 August 2008
DK1 integration updated (2013 Season 4)	22 October 2013
Oculus Rift DK2 support (2014 Season 4)	October 2014
Steam release	12 January 2015
Oculus Rift CV1 support	June 2016
OpenVR and HTC Vive support (2016 Season 4)	2 September 2016
Native OpenXR support	6 July 2022
Dynamic foveated rendering (2025 Season 4)	8 September 2025
iRacing Connect for Apple Vision Pro	11 May 2026

Pricing

Membership is a subscription. On 29 September 2026 iRacing.com listed regular prices of US$14.75 for one month, US$37.50 for three months, US$124.50 for one year and US$222.50 for two years, with a 30% discount on new memberships at the time. Membership includes 32 cars and 29 tracks with more than 85 configurations, which cover all rookie-class races. Other content is licensed individually as a one-time purchase: US$11.95 per car, and US$11.95 or US$14.95 per track depending on the track.

Esports

In March 2020, after COVID-19 led to the cancellation or postponement of NASCAR races, NASCAR, iRacing and Fox Sports staged the first eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series event. The race was held on 22 March 2020 in place of the canceled race at Homestead-Miami Speedway, using iRacing's virtual version of the track. It was won by Denny Hamlin and drew 903,000 viewers on FS1, and Fox then committed to cover the rest of the season. TechCrunch attributed the audience figure to Nielsen Media Research and described the broadcast as the most-watched esports event in US television history at that point.

Reception

On Metacritic, the PC version has a Metascore of 79 ("generally favorable") from four critic reviews. The listed reviews come from IGN Italia (90), Multiplayer.it (85), PC Gamer UK (80) and GameStar (68). In its hands-on with the first CV1 build, Road to VR found that it ran at 90 fps in most situations on its test PC, and iRacing software engineer Shawn Nash described that version as "just the starting point" for further improvements and bug fixes.

System Requirements

The Steam store lists the following requirements. Both tiers require a 64-bit processor and operating system and DirectX 11, and note that iRacing "supports the optional use of virtual reality headsets."

	Minimum	Recommended
OS	Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)	Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)
Processor	4-core CPU (for example Intel Core i5-6600, Intel Core i7-4790, AMD Ryzen 3 4300G)	8 or more cores (for example Intel Core Ultra 7 and 9, Intel Core i7-14700, AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, AMD Ryzen 9 9900X)
Memory	16 GB RAM	32 GB RAM
Graphics	6 GB dedicated memory (for example Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, RX 5600XT)	8 GB dedicated memory (for example Nvidia 2080 Ti, AMD Radeon VII)
Storage	25 GB	100 GB
Network	Broadband internet	Broadband internet

Setup Instructions

To play in VR, iRacing's support guide says players need a headset whose manufacturer software and drivers are installed, a PC that meets both iRacing's and the headset maker's requirements, a working iRacing installation and an active subscription. It recommends a wired rather than wireless connection to the PC and testing the headset with the manufacturer's tools first. VR is chosen with the display mode selector (marked with a headset icon) in the upper right of the iRacing desktop app before the simulation is launched, and the guide suggests a Test Drive session for a first check. It calls 90 frames per second (90 Hz) optimal and suggests starting with sessions of 5 to 10 minutes and building up gradually.