Indiana Jones and the Enigmatic Orb: A Thrilling Gaming Experience on PC

Upon initial launch, the PC variant of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle presents as a highly impressive PC debut. Jumping into the gameplay, there is no shader compilation concern and no apparent traversal issue. It does necessitate a graphics processor equipped with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and there is no fallback to an alternative configuration; however, that’s acceptable—as performance is not a problem in this game. Machine Games has taken this a step further, integrating advanced technology with ‘full ray tracing,’ which processes all lighting through RT, but unfortunately, we cannot discuss this today as it is only enabled on December 9th… which is somewhat disappointing for high-end PC users who accessed it via early entry. Nevertheless, what you do get is an outstanding PC launch, not limited by graphics power but rather by the VRAM allocation of your GPU.

Concerns about running Indiana Jones have been somewhat exaggerated considering that Machine Games managed to get the game functioning on both Xbox Series X and even Series S, indicating there is scalability involved. However, some of that scalability is not available to PC gamers. The game’s primary RT technology is global illumination, which handles indirect light and shadowing. Latest-gen consoles typically show very basic RT performance, thus Machine’s choice is to downgrade it to settings that are lower than low, removing many elements from the GI process. Strikingly, within the jungle, much of the foliage appears absent, causing bright sunlight to appear where it should not, resulting in objects glowing and not blending well within the environment.

While the PC version might also lack those lower-than-low settings, the minimum preset still appears significantly more natural, with occlusion and darkness applied where appropriate and bright lights functioning as they should. Even so, console ‘lower than low’ could have potentially assisted less powerful RT hardware, including handhelds.

Xbox also sacrifices some anisotropic filtering, which is comparable to PC’s medium settings, but in reality seems inferior due to a lackluster implementation of hardware variable rate shading (VRS). The volumetrics on Series X also look diminished compared to PC’s low setting, displaying less detailed beams and increased flickering during motion. Shadows are akin to the medium setting, which decreases the amount of geometry added to the shadow maps, resulting in many objects lacking shadows, especially indoors. Overall, various shortcuts and quality reductions have been employed to run the game smoothly on Series X at extremely high resolutions of around 1800p. In theory, you could leverage these compromises to enhance performance on PC, but in practice, the game runs adequately already, even on RTX 4060-class hardware. Yes, even though it is utilizing RTGI over console quality.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is certainly not a mere minimal experience; however, the VRAM allocation of your GPU is extremely important as the game appears to be designed around a 12GB baseline. Players with 8GB or 10GB cards might encounter issues regarding the texture cache settings. For instance, at 1440p, a 10GB RTX 3080 cannot utilize the ultra texture cache setting without significantly hampering performance. Hence, it is logical to conclude that 8GB users could face even greater challenges. However, context is key. It’s crucial to understand how the texture cache operates; moving from, say, high to medium does not uniformly degrade texture quality—it simply modifies the size of the cache. The smaller the cache size, the more aggressively the game transfers texture data in and out of RAM.

* Optimized settings are maximal across the board, excluding the texture cache. Users with 8GB GPUs are also advised to select medium shadow quality and low hair quality for optimal performance.

There’s a solid guideline here: the game prioritizes textures nearest to the player, and the more VRAM you possess, the higher the texture cache settings you can feasibly use. The greater the setting, the further out the enhanced detail art extends within any given scene. I’ve compiled a helpful table on this page that presents realistic texture cache settings based on your card’s VRAM—but 8GB is indeed the minimum, and you’ll also want to…