Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is out on Steam and the Xbox Store (in early access). The game is still missing path tracing (full ray-tracing) which is expected to land with the launch patch tomorrow. In the meantime, we’ve tested all the graphics options including RTXGI (Ray Traced Global Illumination) which can’t be disabled. The game runs well across most hardware, but don’t take our word for it. Here’s our optimization guide with benchmarks for every graphics setting.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
Enable Resizable BAR.
Turn on Game Mode.
Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle shows decent scaling across the three resolutions. From 90 FPS at 4K “Supreme,” we recorded an average of 158 FPS at 1440p, and 177 FPS at 1080p (native). There seems to be a CPU bottleneck at 1080p, and we’ll look into that later.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle shows minimal performance scaling across its six graphics presets. From 90 FPS at the “Supreme” quality setting, the average framerate increased by just 6 FPS upon switching to the lowest graphics preset at 4K. The only notable change was the higher 1% lows at “Low.”
Graphics Quality Presets
Path Tracing: Full Ray Tracing
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle features path-traced reflections, sun shadows, and indirect global illumination on PC. Indirect global illumination, or diffuse lighting, accounts for multi-bounce light rays. It considers the light reflected and dispersed by non-luminous objects that act as secondary light sources. It’s most evident indoors, in dimly lit areas, and at night.
Path tracing is incredibly taxing even on the fastest graphics cards. The GeForce RTX 4090 drops from 90 FPS to 38.6 FPS upon enabling it. The highest path tracing preset enables, sun shadows, reflections, and indirect global illumination. High disables GI, while Medium disables reflections as well.
Path-traced reflections are the most intensive. They render high-resolution specular reflections, most evident with glass windows. Rasterization uses low-resolution cube-mapped reflections that all look the same.
Path tracing renders accurate window reflections rather than cube-mapped placeholders. This includes distant windows (top-left) and glossy domes.
The window interiors are also visible due to refraction.
The fountain puddle casts more intricate shadow reflections and refractions even as the water flows down the bowl.
Vegetation, buildings, pavements, and planters are brighter as they absorb/reflect light without casting reflections.
Specular highlights that may produce blurry reflections are also considered. See this example.
Path Tracing Off vs Only Reflections
Path-traced global illumination isn’t as taxing but has impacts visuals the most. It adds diffuse/indirect lighting which accounts for light (from luminous sources) scattered by non-luminous sources like walls, floors, ceilings, etc. Observe the below comparison:
The shadows are lighter due to abundant ambient light scattered by the concrete surfaces. It’s most evident on the building walls (sunlight tinted) and below the fountain.
The planter (left) retains the sunlight tint, and the vegetation is accurately shaded, brighter near the tips, and darker towards the interior.
The tent is darker farther away from the candle, with an orange tint around the candle-illuminated areas (color bleeding). The floor is illuminated by external light which is further reflected to illuminate the roof.
Path-traced sun shadows are the least taxing, rendering highly detailed contact hardening soft shadows. The rasterized soft shadows are low-resolution, blurry, and blocky further away in the distance.
They fail to retain finer geometric details like railings, branches, leaves, etc. These tend to pop in as you move closer to the caster.
Path-traced shadows are sharper and retain intricate detail, with softer silhouettes further away.
These are calculated on a per-pixel basis, while shadow maps are cascaded and wholly dependent on the player’s position.
Path Tracing Off vs Only Sun Shadows
Path-traced subsurface scattering on foliage enables light penetration through leaves, bushes, and grass. It’s part of global illumination and is enabled at the “Full RT” quality.
It makes leafy vegetation translucent, allowing the partial passage of light through them.
It improves the diffuse lighting in heavily vegetated areas like forests.
Full RT vs RT High
What’s the difference between ray and path-tracing? The two are based on the same principle of tracing how light rays traverse and interact with a scene. Here’s what sets the two apart:
Ray tracing usually traces a single ray per pixel, from the camera (screen) into the scene:
The rays that hit a surface or object, illuminate them, thereby creating shadows or reflections.
The exact triangle intersected by each ray is located and its color is used to determine the lighting for that pixel.
Separate reflection, refraction, and shadow rays are generated for every applicable effect that are further traced until they hit an object.
Gathering this data, the rays then travel back to the light source, where it’s used to calculate the scene’s lighting.
Ray Tracing
Path tracing is similar to ray tracing but differs at the start and the end. While ray tracing casts a single ray per pixel, path tracing casts several rays in random directions through each pixel.
These rays bounce off objects multiple times, across a wider area, tracing the path of many different rays before returning to the source with a lot more lighting data.
However, unlike ray-tracing, only a subset of the rays cast will be used to calculate the scene’s lighting.
Using the Monte Carlo simulation, an ideal and more probable number of paths are used for tracing the light’s back to the light source.
Path tracing can solve complex lighting scenes, including caustics, particles, and indirect multi-bounce illumination.
Vegetation Animation Quality
Vegetation Animation enables the movement of plants, bushes, and tree branches due to weather effects and player interaction. While its performance impact is trivial at 2-3%, it may lead to frametime issues on low-end GPUs, including the RTX 3060 and 4060.
Even on higher-end GPUs like the RTX 4090, we see a notable drop in frametime consistency (1% lows) at the ultra-quality option. It’s best left disabled if face stutters in forested regions.
Shadows & Decals
Shadow quality only impacts visuals (notably) when the setting is reduced to the lowest quality option. Above low, the differences are trivial. That said:
Shadow pop-up frequency increases and distant shadow detail drops notably at the low quality option.
The performance delta is minimal.
They do, however, use a substantial amount of VRAM above medium.
Shadow Quality
Decal Rendering Distance sets the LOD for various effects, including fog, props, paints, and other surface effects. It nominally impacts framerates, granting a 1-2 FPS boost at “Low.” The 1% lows also see a subtle gain.
Decal Rendering Distance
Global Illumination & Reflections
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle leverages RTGI (Ray Traced Global Illumination) to improve diffuse lighting. It can’t be disabled. Reducing the quality slightly boosts performance at the cost of worse light penetration (fewer rays).
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle leverages DDGI. This method involves placing probes across the scene in an mipmapped fashed (denser near the player, fewer farther away).
Each probe casts rays outwards to probe the surrounding lighting, recording the contribution of light at the intersection points.
The results are stored in the probe, including irradiance and distance to geometry.
At render time, the GI for a point is caculated using the nearby probes.
This requires BVH-ization of the scene geometry.
Infinite bounce GI is achieved using shading data from previous frames. However, I don’t believe that’s used in this game.
Even though it’s independent of screen resolution, the probe count inreases with the internal rendering resolution (at least in this game).
Ray Traced Global Illumination
Reflections enable low-resolution reflections that grant a minor performance gain when disabled. Most mirror-like surfaces like windows use pre-baked cube-mapped reflections, while water and metals adopt screen space reflections.
Reflection Quality
Water Quality & Volumetrics
Water Quality sets the detail of water textures, with higher quality options enabling refraction (caustics), wetness, ripples, and vapors. It’s 3-4% faster at low, though river/lake adjacent regions might see larger gains.
Water Quality
Volumetrics sets the quality of fog, light shafts, and other related effects. It doesn’t appreciably impact performance, at least not in the urban locations of the game.
Volumetrics: Low vs Ultra
Hair & Texture Filtering
Hair Quality adjusts in-hair effects like ambient occlusion for NPCs and companion characters. It doesn’t notably impact the game’s performance.
Hair: Low vs High
Texture Filtering maintains the sharpness and detail of distant (perpendicular to the screen) textures. Lower-quality options employ bilinear/trilinear, while higher-quality options leverage anisotropic filtering. Reducing it grants a 3% FPS boost but blurs textures. Best left at the highest.
Texture Filtering Comparisons
Upscaling & Frame Generation
The early access version of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle only includes DLSS upscaling and frame generation. We recorded the largest gain upon switching from DLAA to DLSS “Quality” mode. Scaling down to “Balanced” and Performance” granted nominal FPS bumps.
The game’s RTGI (Ray Traced Global Illumination) implementation scales with resolution. Consequently, enabling upscaling reduces the resolution of ray-traced global illumination. The shift is most evident upon switching from native to upscaled.
DLAA vs DLSS Upscaling
Frame Generation grants a 40% performance boost over native when used without upscaling. When paired with upscaling, it can improve the average framerates by 24-30% at 4K “Supreme.”
Indiana Jones & the Great Circle: VRAM Usage
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle uses up to 15 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Supreme.” Reducing the texture quality to “Very Ultra” reduces it to ~13 GB, while “Ultra” stays below 12.5 GB. Either way, the game is a VRAM hog, utilizing up to 10 GB at the lowest graphics preset at 4K.
Even 1080p and 1440p leverage over 13 GB at the “Supreme” quality settings. Enabling upscaling reduces the graphics memory consumption by roughly 1 GB but frame generation increases it by the same amount.
DLSS Balanced
Path tracing increases the VRAM usage to 17 GB at 1440p native, 16 GB with DLSS upscaling, and 19 GB with frame generation. At 4K, these figures increase to 18.6 GB, 17 GB, and 20 GB, respectively.
DLSS Performance
Indiana Jones & the Great Circle: CPU Bottlenecks
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is predominantly GPU-bound. Even at 1080p, we observed a GPU-Busy deviation of just 1%. Ergo, the game should run well on budget and low-end CPUs.
Path tracing raises the GPU-Busy deviation over 10% at 1440p and 4K with upscaling. Enabling frame generation offsets it back to near 0%.
Optimized Settings for Indiana Jones & the Great Circle
Settings
High-end
Midrange
Low-end PC
Resolution
4K (3840×2160)
1440p (2560×1440)
1080p (1920×1080)
FPS Target
120 FPS|144 FPS
75 FPS|90 FPS
60 FPS
Path Tracing FPS
60 FPS|90 FPS
–
–
Texture Quality
Supreme
Supreme (12 GB VRAM)
High or Ultra
Shadow Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Decal Rendering Distance
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Global Illumination (RTXGI)
High
High
High
Reflection Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Motion Blur
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Water Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Volumetrics Quality
Medium
Medium
Medium
Hair Quality
High
High
High
Texture Filtering
Very Ultra
Very Ultra
Very Ultra
Path Tracing (RTX 40 GPUs)
Full (DLSS to Performance)
–
Off
Upscaling (If PT is OFF)
DLAA|Quality
DLAA|Quality
Balanced
Frame Generation
On
Off
On (if avail)
Path tracing is only recommended for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and higher-end RTX 30 series graphics cards with at least 16 GB VRAM.
CPU
Core i9-14900K/Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Core i7-13700K/Ryzen 7 7700X
Core i5-12600/ Ryzen 5 5600
GPU
GeForce RTX 4090
GeForce RTX 4070/Radeon RX 7900 GRE
GeForce RTX 3060/3060 Ti/4060
Memory
32GB (dual-channel)
16GB (dual-channel)
Less than: 16GB (dual-channel)
High-end
Midrange
Low-end PC
Settings
RTX 4090
RTX 4080
RTX 4070 Ti
RTX 4070 Super
RTX 3080 Ti
RTX 4070
Resolution
4K
4K
4K|1440p
4K|1440p
4K|1440p
4K|1440p
FPS Target
120 FPS|144 FPS
90 FPS+
75 FPS|90 FPS
60 FPS|75 FPS+
60 FPS|75 FPS
60 FPS|75 FPS
Path Tracing FPS
60 FPS+ at 4K
60 FPS+ at 4K
–
–
–
–
Texture Quality
Supreme
Supreme (Ultra for PT)
High|Ultra
High|Ultra
High|Ultra
High|Ultra
Shadow Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Decal Rendering Distance
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Global Illumination (RTXGI)
High
High
High
High
High
High
Reflection Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Motion Blur
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Water Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Volumetrics Quality
Medium
Medium
Medium
Medium
Medium
Medium
Hair Quality
High
High
High
High
High
High
Texture Filtering
Very Ultra
Very Ultra
Very Ultra
Very Ultra
Very Ultra
Very Ultra
Path Tracing
Full (DLSS Quality + FG)
High (DLSS Performance)
Off
Off
Off
Off
Ray Reconst
On
Off
–
–
–
–
Upscaling (DLSS)
Quality
Quality
Balanced|Quality
Balanced|Quality
Performance|Balanced
Balanced|Quality
Frame Generation
Off|On
Off
Off
Off
Off
Off
Indiana Jones & the Great Circle: Best Settings for Low-end PC
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle runs remarkably well on low-end hardware…as long as you keep path tracing disabled. The GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB averaged 70 FPS at 1080p “Supreme” quality graphics settings with DLSS set to quality mode.
The GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU on the Alienware x14 produced similar numbers at 1080p, but the texture quality had to be reduced to “High” and DLSS set to balanced mode.
Here’s our analysis of the game’s performance on low-end PCs featuring the RTX 60-class GPUs.
Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Find me at HardwareTimes and PC Opset.
