Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a PC killer — in the best way

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has no business looking as good as it does. The game is demanding, and there are some minor issues, but the work of MachineGames and the id Tech 7 engine paint over the seams that have become all too obvious in modern PC releases. For the most part, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a seamless experience. For the first time in a long time, it’s a game that feels held back by hardware of today more so than optimization.

It’s a wonderful experience, and one that you can take part in even if you don’t have the best graphics card in your gaming PC — given a few key compromises. There are some problems I’d like to see addressed in future updates, some of which are already in the works.

But for what’s available on day one, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the best PC release from a technical standpoint I’ve seen in quite some time.

The joy of id Tech

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t using Unreal Engine, and that’s probably the best decision MachineGames made. Although it’s possible to get a smooth experience with Unreal Engine, such as what I saw last year with Lies of P, the engine is notorious for shoddy performance and consistent stuttering, which is something I’ve seen on full display this year with games like Silent Hill 2 and Black Myth: Wukong. 

The Unreal trap isn’t present here. MachineGames is continuing the work it did with its Wolfenstein releases by using a modified version of id Tech 7, branded as Motor, which is the same engine behind the buttery smooth Doom Eternal. And the experience here is buttery smooth too, barring a few minor issues. For the highlights, there’s basically no stuttering. You’ll occasionally see a brief spike in frame time when the game auto-saves, but the blip is so minor that it’d be hard to notice unless you’re specifically monitoring frame time.

There are a couple of reasons for that. First, and most importantly, id Tech 7 doesn’t have a main thread. Engines like Unreal have a main thread and render thread, the latter of which handles the majority of the game logic. Id Tech 7 works differently. Instead of one or two primary threads on your CPU, the engine dispatches jobs that are thread-agnostic, allowing the engine to scale to more cores. This gets around major traversal stutter problems, as a single thread isn’t suddenly loaded up with work when passing a loading zone, which normally would clog up the main thread and cause a stutter.

In addition, id Tech 7 exclusively uses Vulkan on PC. I’ve previously tested how Vulkan compares to DirectX 12, and in many games, Vulkan is simply faster. That’s not a universal truth — Baldur’s Gate 3 saw slightly better performance with DirectX 12 — but Vulkan generally offers better performance. Although DirectX 12 is powerful, it’s also an extremely low-level API — it has close access to the hardware. That can lead to a lot of wasted API calls, which slows down your rendering.

There’s a minor issue you should be aware of, however. The main problem comes in cutscenes, where the game locks to 60 frames per second. That’s not an issue alone, but during most cutscenes, the CPU is absolutely slammed and animations often look as if they’re running below 60 fps. Most cutscenes are rendered in-engine and transition seamlessly in and out of gameplay, and the stuttering animations can be distracting. It wasn’t enough to ruin the experience — not even close — but I hope the issue is addressed in a future patch.

That’s a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, however. With id Tech 7 at the helm, and the diligent work of MachineGames, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle runs like a dream with the right hardware. There’s even an extensive performance overlay baked into the game, similar to Doom Eternal, which I love to see.

The 8GB GPU question

I’m not going to retread ground here. The moment Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launched, it became clear that the game seriously struggled with 8GB graphics cards. That remains true. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is living proof that concerns around 8GB of VRAM on graphics cards like the RTX 4060 Ti were valid. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all game, however. The severity of issues with 8GB graphics cards varies wildly.

There are a few important notes here. First, your performance with an 8GB graphics card will change depending on which level you’re in. You may not run into issues on smaller levels, such as the opening section in Marshall College, but larger gameplay sections can stress VRAM more. In the first patch for the game, MachineGames says it “improved performance on larger game levels if using an 8GB VRAM video card.” It hasn’t resolved the issue, but the patch at least shows that the developer is aware of the problem.

As far as getting the game running on an 8GB graphics card, you don’t need to give up hope. You can push settings like textures and shadows down significantly to free up the frame buffer without a major visual loss. First, textures. There isn’t a texture quality setting in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Instead, you get a texture pool size. This is a cache, stored in your GPU’s memory, that functions like a level-of-detail setting for textures. At higher sizes, you’ll see higher quality textures further away from the camera. And if you’re not running into VRAM limitations, the quality difference basically doesn’t exist.

You can see that in the image above. There is no difference in the texture quality between Supreme and Low textures here, even after a proper game restart to apply the changes. Keep in mind that there are six total levels for textures — Low, Medium, High, Ultra, Very Ultra, and Supreme — and the fact that there’s no difference between the highest and lowest setting is very telling. You can seriously push the textures down if you’re running with an 8GB graphics card and still enjoy the very detailed world that MachineGames built.

It isn’t free, however. Pushing down settings like textures and shadows leads to some severe pop-in. Id Tech 7 has a rather sophisticated culling system that seamlessly de-loads sections of the game that aren’t visible, and it works in stages. Scenes aren’t culled out at once. You can see this in action in the video below, where the light dims overhead of the motorcycle and eventually disappears in the garage. In this same video, you can also see the pop-in I’m talking about.

The game tries to smooth transition into higher-quality textures, shadows, and lighting effects, but at lower quality settings, those transitions become much more noticeable. When walking into the church, you can see the shadow from the window cycle through a handful of quality settings before settling on its final destination. The shadow is displayed in its full quality when it’s closest to the camera, but you can still see the pop-in happen.

If you’re running an 8GB graphics card, you can still play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Start with textures, pushing the setting down and playing for a bit to see your performance. If you’re VRAM-limited, you should see a sudden and aggressive performance improvement at the proper setting for your GPU. Shadows can drop, too, though I wouldn’t recommend pushing them down to Low. That can severely hurt image quality for dynamic shadows, particularly in wooded areas of the game.

Path tracing not required

Ray tracing is interesting in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. As the system requirements tipped me off, the game requires a GPU with dedicated ray tracing hardware. That means you’ll need at least an RTX 20-series GPU from Nvidia or an RX 6000-series GPU from AMD. That’s because Indiana Jones and the Great Circle uses ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) across the game with no option to turn it off. That’s not a bad thing in this case considering the solid performance of the title — RTGI just helps it look beautiful.

Path tracing is a different beast. In the settings, you get additional ray tracing options. There’s ray-traced sun shadows, reflections, and indirect illumination, and turning on all three gets you path tracing — or, as Nvidia likes to call it, full ray tracing. The game looks great with path tracing, but unlike Alan Wake 2 or Cyberpunk 2077, it’s not a completely transformative experience. Depending on the scene, it’s tough to spot what path tracing is doing at all.

The video above is an example of that. Before I point out the differences, try to see if you can spot them yourself. There isn’t much. What I can see is that the torch closest to the camera has a more accurate shadow on the wall with path tracing turned on — it’s darker farther down on the wall, while without path tracing, the shadow stays at a single luminance.

It truly depends on the scene, though. In the same level — honestly, just a few minutes apart gameplay-wise — I stumbled upon the scene you can see in the video above. The indirect illumination here is doing a ton of work. You get a more aggressive clip of light on the box from the candle at the back of the scene, as well as deeper shadows across the entire image.

Then, there are some scenes where path tracing is transformative, particularly when it can show off a lot of reflections and sun shadows. As you can see in the short walk around Marshall College toward the beginning of the game, path tracing picks up on the subtle shadows created by the texture of the carpet. You can also see reflections in even the tiniest shards of glass, as well as on all of the display cases. In these types of scenes, where you can see all of the ray tracing effects at once, path tracing elevates the experience.

It’s important to highlight that it elevates an experience that already looks stellar, though. The forced use of RTGI does a lot of work to make Indiana Jones and the Great Circle look beautiful, so if you don’t have the hardware for full-on path tracing, you aren’t missing out on the core of the visual experience. The extra effects really show up in the details — those shards of glass, the more accurate shadows, etc.

Designed for Nvidia

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an Nvidia-sponsored game, and that focus has led to an unfortunate situation at launch. The game supports Nvidia’s excellent DLSS 3, but it doesn’t support AMD’s FSR 3 or Intel’s XeSS. If you want high-quality upscaling, you need an Nvidia GPU, and if you want frame generation, you need an Nvidia RTX 40-series GPU. The features are great here, but they’re prohibitive, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would seriously benefit from FSR 3.

If you can’t use DLSS in the game, you’ll have to rely on built-in upscaling through TAA. There’s a dynamic resolution option in the game if you aren’t using DLSS. The problem is that native TAA in the game isn’t very stable, while DLSS is extremely stable. You can see that in the video above. Even without upscaling, you can see how TAA struggles to place the fine details in the barbed wire while DLSS locks those details in place.

In addition to the lack of alternative upscaling options, the only frame generation available is through DLSS 3, which is fairly big oversight considering Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has full path tracing. It’s not dissimilar from Starfield last year, where the exclusivity on FSR at launch limited image quality for Nvidia players. Here, all non-Nvidia players will have to settle for mediocre TAA and no frame generation, despite the fact that options like FSR 3 and XeSS are available.

The developer says that it is adding FSR in through a future update, but at this time, we don’t have any details on which version of FSR the game will support, nor when it will arrive. There’s no doubt that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a fantastic showcase for DLSS 3, but on a practical level, the game seriously needs FSR 3 support to help more players see the visual feast on offer. It’s not just for AMD and Intel GPUs, either — FSR 3 would bring frame generation to RTX 20-series and 30-series GPUs, as well.