In a bid to send older gaming PCs to the museum, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s high-end system requirements, including mandatory hardware ray tracing, make it clear that only the most powerful rigs will be able to handle Indy’s latest adventure.
Bethesda and MachineGames came forward just days before the game’s release to reveal that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will require mandatory hardware ray tracing. This means that the graphic cards from the now-iconic Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000 or AMD Radeon RX 5000 series won’t be supported.
The least powerful graphic card that will be able to run the game is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super with 8GB of RAM, or AMD Radeon RX 6600. Players will also need an Intel Core i7 10th gen or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or better, combined with 16GB of RAM. However, that is not the most worrying part. The fact is this will give players a chance to play the game at low settings on a native 1080p at a targeted 60fps.
Playing a game in 2024 at 1080p would mean higher FPS and not a bare minimum. The bar rises a generation higher for 2k and 4k resolution. For recommended 1440p at FPS on high settings, Bethesda suggests having an RTX 3080ti or AMD Radeon RX 7700XT with 12GB of RAM, then 32GB system memory, and an i7 12th gen or an AMD Ryzen 7 7700.
For those who want to experience the game in a 4k resolution at 60fps and ultra settings, they will need at least an i7 13th gen or AMD Ryzen 7 7900, combined with Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 ili AMD Radeon RX 7900XT and 32GB of system memory. This is not the end of the high demands Indy imposes on PC gamers. The full path tracing experience with frame-gen pushes the system requirements well above expectations and logic since the developer has excluded AMD graphic cards.
Minimum requirements for 1080p, 60 FPS, Path Tracing Low, DLSS Quality + Frame-Generation are an Intel Processor Core, i7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, an Nvidia GeForce graphics card, RTX 4070 12GB, 16 GB RAM of memory, and 120 GB of storage.
Recommendations for 1440p, 60 FPS, Path Tracing High, DLSS Balanced + Frame-Generation include an Intel Core processor, i7-12700K or AMD Ryzen 7 7700, an Nvidia GeForce graphics card, RTX 4080 16GB, 32 GB RAM of memory, and 120 GB (SSD).
Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi) and Indy (Troy Baker) take a stealth approach in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024), MachineGames
Recommended for 4K, 60 FPS, Path Tracing Ultra, DLSS Performance + Frame-Generation is an Intel Core, i7-13900 or AMD Ryzen 7 7900, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, 24GB, 32 GB RAM for memory, and storage of 120 GB (SSD).
While this doesn’t necessarily mean that the optimization is the problem for using this approach, even Cyberpunk 2077, a similar game in technical terms, offered better optimization compared to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Projekt Red’s sci-fi RPG shooter is one of the most visually and technically stunning video games, and it has achieved near-photorealistic fidelity while being more accessible to older hardware.
Indy, on the other hand, relies on heavy upscaling and will push many players away from its linear cinematics-filled adventure. Unfortunately, at Path Tracing Low the game renders internally at 720p before upscaling to achieve the target resolution. This is similar to both 1440p and 4k resolutions since higher settings are upscaled from lower internal resolutions through DLSS and frame generations.
Indy’s (Troy Baker) finds himself taken captive in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024), MachineGames
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a first-person stealth action adventure with an occasional switch to 3rd person for traversal activities. It was released for Windows and Xbox Series X/S on December 9th.