A modding group called Paralympics Productions has gotten Grand Theft Auto 5 running natively on the original Nintendo Switch, using a homebrew port built from the game’s 2023 leaked source code. Rockstar never released GTA 5 on Switch hardware, despite the game shipping all the way back in 2013 on PS3 and Xbox 360, so this fills a gap the studio didn’t choose to fill. Reverse-engineering the leaked “Legacy” source let the team recompile the game’s logic for Arm and run it directly on the Switch’s Tegra X1 chip, with no Android layer or emulation involved. You do need a jailbroken and overclocked Switch to get anything resembling a playable framerate, though.
At stock clocks, the game reportedly limps along at 10-25 FPS, and only settles into a steadier 30 FPS once the CPU, GPU, and memory are pushed past their limits through tools like sys-clk. Given the Tegra X1 is over a decade old and thermally constrained even in its own console, that’s a fairly reasonable outcome for a 2013 game running its actual PC-tier logic on hardware never meant to touch it. The full install reportedly weighs in around 49GB, and Paralympics Productions has already shipped a few patches, with an Android port apparently in the works too. Of course, this doesn’t automatically mean GTA 6 is coming to Switch 2 anytime soon, since this only works because of the leaked source code.