NASCAR 25 PC review – good game, basic port

NASCAR 25 launched on PC a month after consoles, built on Unreal Engine 5.5 but with Nanite and Lumen disabled, making it look more like a UE4 title. The PC port is functional but bare-bones: no upscaler selection, no FOV control, broken mouse cursor handling, missing keyboard prompts, and no way to reset input bindings. Graphics presets show minimal differences outside of shadows and texture resolution. Benchmarks reveal a significant single-thread CPU bottleneck in races with full grids, limiting even an i9-12900K below 120 FPS. On Steam Deck, the game initially crashed due to a Wine API bug (since fixed in Proton Bleeding Edge), but CPU bottlenecks make stable 30 FPS unachievable. INI tweaks like disabling TSR and setting 200% resolution scale can noticeably improve image quality beyond what the in-game options allow. The gameplay itself is enjoyable for a casual NASCAR fan, with a career mode offering light management mechanics and satisfying on-track progression.