Indiana Jones and the Enigmatic Circle: A Journey Through Time and Texture

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is becoming one of my all-time favorite games, capturing the essence and feel of the classic films – and its graphics play a significant role in that. The original game features a form of ray-traced global illumination, but Machine Games has taken it a step further for the PC edition, providing a complete ray tracing enhancement. This improves an already visually stunning game even more, effectively bridging the gap between RTGI and full offline rendering. While it has its challenges – which we’ll delve into – overall, it’s an impressive upgrade. Yes, it may be demanding on hardware, but you can still enjoy most of the benefits on RTX 4070-class systems at 1440p resolution.

The essence of full RT is that it automatically ‘corrects’ many of the flaws found in the traditional game engine, and one of the most noticeable is its shadows – or rather, the cascaded shadow maps cast by the sun or moon. Moving through the game reveals significant visual discontinuities, flipping between blocky shadow designs very close to the camera in a highly distracting manner. Full RT resolves that, greatly enhancing shadow quality, realism, and detail.

The ‘popping’ effect of shadow cascades disappears completely, while also reducing aliased noise in shadows close to the player’s camera, especially noticeable in the jungle sequences. Without full RT, shadow maps struggle to capture the finer details from foliage, causing small details to pop in and out of existence inconsistently. RT shadows encompass every detail from the leaves and branches overhead, featuring smooth shadow gradation without the awkward aliasing or popping seen in the original game. Additionally, the fundamental nature of RT technology ensures you receive accurate penumbral effects: shadows near the casting object are sharp, becoming more diffuse the further away from the object they are.

Minor details also benefit: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle boasts high-quality geometry, and over time, objects in the game are either left out of the shadow map calculations or are too small for the shadow map to capture correctly. RT sunlight shadows, on the other hand, are computed on a per-pixel basis, providing every rivet, blade of grass, or tiny decorative item with dynamic and accurate self-shadowing, significantly enhancing the object’s visual quality and material realism.

Full RT is also revolutionary for glass rendering. In its absence, glass reflections are entirely generated using static cube maps – rudimentary representations of the scene, with low resolution and often poorly aligned with the environment, appearing ‘subpar’. Full RT handles reflections, offering dynamic ray-traced reflections that accurately capture the scene’s visual information. The world looks much more vibrant in comparison, and glass takes on a fresh luster. While there isn’t an overwhelming amount of glass scattered throughout Dr. Jones’ globe-trotting adventure, there is enough to serve as a notable improvement over the original game’s cube maps.

Perhaps the most remarkable enhancement to visuals comes from the shift to indirect lighting, both diffuse and specular. Specular lighting refers to both bright and rough reflections, while diffuse lighting encompasses the light bouncing around a scene, illuminating darker areas. A variety of systems are removed and replaced with ray-traced indirect lighting, which performs multiple bounces and includes a caching method for even greater effect. The original game’s screen-space reflections, cube maps, and elements from the RTGI system work decently, yet they have their obvious limitations. All reflections must be mirror-like, for instance, which does not seem realistic on rougher surfaces. Materials can also appear too flat compared to how they should look, a concern that I will showcase in my video embedded on this page.

The upgrade in material quality can be substantial: polished hardwood floors now appear more like the real thing, reflecting detailed gloss from bright light sources, like the sky. The same holds true for marble, which looked acceptable at grazing angles, yet failed to seem realistic when viewed head-on. Full RT’s perspective-accurate reflections eliminate that issue entirely. The impact on metal rendering in particular can be astounding: in the original game, metal surfaces often appeared dull and dark, causing all the polished artifacts to look lackluster upon closer inspection. With full RT, metal objects showcase reflections of themselves and their surroundings. Brass, silver, and gold now appear more distinctly rather than largely similar. Multi-bounce reflections from the indirect lighting enhancement certainly elevate the visuals, transforming some mundane scenes from looking ‘videogamey’ due to dull materials to appearing genuinely striking.

The improvements in diffuse lighting are also transformative. The standard RTGI system relies on a grid of probes emanating from the camera’s initial position. These probes then ‘send out’ rays from their perspective into the surrounding area. It is sufficient to create impressive results, but it is not per-pixel like full RT, making it susceptible to…

“`gentle leaky effects appear in various ways, while the amount of light reflection is also diminished, affecting stability. Once again, the video presents these scenarios quite well. Activating the course-tracing, lighting is assessed on a per-pixel basis, rectifying the inaccuracies. The fact that a significantly greater number of objects are included at some level in the BVH structure (the geometry being rendered) greatly enhances realism, especially noticeable in more intricate scenes like the jungle. Along with looking more authentic, it significantly heightens contrast. This difference is very clear when comparing to the Xbox Series X, where even fewer objects are rendered than on PC – with full RT enabled, the game appears to be generationally distinct in such scenes.

Thus, the game appears markedly improved, yet not everything is superior, as the complete RT execution in Indiana Jones does not reach the level of detail seen in Cyberpunk 2077 or Alan Wake 2. It does display enhancements almost everywhere, but in certain areas, the changes are quite minimal due to residual rasterization in some unexpected locations. Shadows and light sources not from the sun remain rasterized and utilize shadow maps. Indoor environments consistently reveal the same shadow artifacts and points within the flawed rendering. Consequently, shadows exhibit their share of quality issues, gentle leaks through objects are not effectively managed, and there are even lights that do not cast shadows. Indiana Jones is not utilizing RTXDI or ReSTIR Lighting Fixtures, so some illumination still occurs through the rasterization process.