If you’ve paid the extra cash to play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle when it launches in early access tonight, then prepare for disappointment if you were hoping to max out the graphics settings. According to Nvidia, you won’t be able to enable full ray tracing (path tracing) in the early access game, with this feature only being available when the game officially launches later in December.
All the game’s graphical presets will use ray tracing in some form or another, resulting in the surprisingly demanding Indiana Jones and the Great Circle system requirements. However, the full ray tracing specs looked set to offer a visual treat to owners of the best graphics card models available right now, with Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 cards required for every tier. In fact, the Ultra specs require a GeForce RTX 4090, and even that needs to use frame generation.
Adding more visual fidelity to the game for the official launch date wouldn’t normally be an issue, but in this case it’s a kicker for Indy enthusiasts who’ve paid the $100 fee for the Digital Premium Edition Advanced Access package to get early access to the game, and now won’t even get the full cinematic lighting experience until the same time as everyone else.
If you own a decent GPU, and you’ve paid all that money, we’d wager you’d rather have saved some money and just waited for the official Indiana Jones and the Great Circle release date instead.
This news comes from an Nvidia blog, where the GPU maker proudly discusses all its graphics tech that’s going into the game. This includes support for Nvidia DLSS 3 with frame generation, which is even a requirement for all the full ray tracing tiers.
However, Nvidia then drops the bomb, which is that the full path tracing mode won’t be in the version going live on December 6. “On December 9th, Full Ray Tracing will further upgrade Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PC,” says the company. It’s this mode that will really elevate the visuals to super-realistic levels.
Nvidia describes the path tracing mode as a “highly accurate way to render light and its effect on a scene, used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that are indistinguishable from reality.” The company adds that “following the release of the update, shadows, reflections, and global illumination will all be accurately rendered.”
Path tracing is computationally extremely demanding, but it does result in amazingly realistic lighting, as we saw when Cyberpunk 2077 introduced its path tracing mode. In this game, we found that only Nvidia RTX 4000-series GPUs could cope with the workload, though, with every AMD Radeon GPU we’ve tried really struggling with the processing demands.
Nvidia has recently been giving away Indiana Jones and the Great Circle free with certain GPUs and laptops, and this version is also the Digital Premium Edition Advanced Access package. If you’ve taken advantage of that deal, and got the game for free anyway, then it’s not much to ask to wait a few more days for path tracing to appear, but we suspect this delay is going to annoy owners of Nvidia GPUs who’ve paid the full $100 for the premium package.
In the meantime, check out our guide to all the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle missions to get a feel for what’s coming in the game, as well as all the details of the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle cast, where you can find out who’s in the game.