The unofficial effort to get Grand Theft Auto V running on the Nintendo Switch has come a long way. A new video from the handheld-testing channel Deck Wizard shows GTA 5 playing full story missions and free roam on a Switch Lite, the smallest and least powerful console in the family, on the latest build of a native homebrew port.
This is the work of a developer known as M0jso, under the Paralympics Productions banner, and it is a native port rather than emulation. It takes the GTA V source code that leaked in 2023 and recompiles the game to run directly on the Switch's ARM chip, with no Android, Linux or streaming layer in between. To fit the console's 4 GB of memory, the team stripped out most of the DLC, compressed the assets and cut the draw distance, leaving the whole thing weighing at a lean 49GB.
Fair warning, this isn't a plug-and-play mod. You need a modded Switch on custom firmware and heavy overclocking, through tools like Horizon OC, to reach playable frame rates. Do that, and the game reportedly holds around 30 FPS in a lot of areas, roughly in line with the old PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. Saving works through the in-game phone.
Understandably, Grand Theft Auto Online, gyro, and HD rumble, aren't supported.
Switch GTA V Port Progress Over the Years
— | 2024 (Superstar South) | 2026 (M0jso / Paralympics) |
|---|---|---|
What runs | The prologue, briefly | Full story missions and free roam |
Performance | Choppy, crashing quickly | Around 30 FPS in many areas, overclocked |
Hardware | A stock Switch | A modded, overclocked Switch, even the Lite |
State | A proof of concept | Reasonably playable |
How far the unofficial effort has come since the 2024 attempt.
Back in 2024, we covered an early proof-of-concept from a different group, Superstar South, that got the prologue loading on a stock Switch. It was choppy, it crashed fast and it was more "look, it boots" than anything you would sit down and play. Two years and a lot of community work later, M0jso's port runs entire missions on the weakest Switch there is. It is a separate project, but it is the same leaked code paying off.
It fits a pattern of Grand Theft Auto fans building Rockstar Games ports the company never bothered to make and probably never will. At the moment, a separate group is working on a Grand Theft Auto IV project, recompiling the game for the Android and Switch. All of it comes as Rockstar keeps GTA V off Nintendo hardware entirely, where the only official option is a rough re-release in the form of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition and as Grand Theft Auto VI is confirmed to skip the Switch 2.
Fans have wondered for years whether any Rockstar game would reach the Switch 2, and the community keeps answering the question itself.
The catch, as usual, as that this project is on borrowed time. It runs on leaked source code and Take-Two Interactive has gone after modders before for less and Nintendo is famously quick to sue. So don't expect these builds to go mainstream. These will stay firmly in the modding scene rather than on a storefront.
None of it is official, and none of it will be, but more than a decade after launch, GTA V is running on a Nintendo handheld, as long as you are willing to jailbreak one to see it.