On first boot, the PC version of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle presents as a simply great PC release. Getting into the action, there’s no shader compilation stutter and no obtrusive traversal stutter. It does require a graphics card with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and there is no fallback to a software alternative, but that’s OK – performance is not a problem in this title. Machine Games has gone one step further, embracing future tech with ‘full ray tracing’, which renders all lighting via RT, but unfortunately we cannot talk about this today as it’s only enabled on December 9th… which is a bit of a disappointment for high-end PC users who bought in via early access. Still, what you get is still an excellent PC release, not so much limited by graphics power but rather the VRAM allocation of your GPU.
Worries about running Indiana Jones were somewhat blown out of proportion bearing in mind that Machine Games got the game running on Xbox Series X and even Series S, so there is scalability here. That said, some of that scalability is not available to PC users. The game’s key RT technology is global illumination, handling indirect lighting and shadowing. Current-gen consoles have very mediocre RT performance, so Machine’s solution here is simply to degrade it to lower-than-low settings, removing many objects from the GI pass. Critically, in the jungle, much of the vegetation is missing, leading to bounce light from the sun manifesting where it shouldn’t, so objects glow and don’t look properly situated in the environment.
PC may lack those lower than low settings, but the minimum preset still looks a lot more natural, with occlusion and darkness where it makes sense and bounce lighting working as it should. Even so, console ‘lower than low’ could have helped less capable RT hardware, including handhelds.
Xbox also compromises on anisotropic filtering, which is closest to PC’s medium, but actually looks worse due to a disappointing implementation of hardware variable rate shading (VRS). Volumetrics on Series X also look degraded to PC’s low with less detailed beams and more flicker in motion. Shadows are closest to the medium setting, which reduces the amount of geometry added to the shadow maps, so entire objects lose shadows, particularly indoors. Basically, there are a number of shortcuts and quality degradations used to get the game running well on Series X at very high resolutions of around 1800p. In theory, you can use these compromises to boost performance on PC, but in actual fact, the game runs fast enough already, even on hardware of RTX 4060 class. Yes, even though it’s using RTGI in excess of console quality.