Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is currently on everyone's lips and is generally well received by players and critics. Meanwhile, the game is a little nicer and can also be played from the cloud.
Already at the early access launch there were new game-ready drivers from NVIDIA with support for DLSS 3 and frame generation. With Update 1 of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, owners of powerful graphics cards from NVIDIA can now look forward to further improved graphics, as path tracing is now also supported. This costs a lot of performance, but it makes the game a little nicer.
Path tracing, or full ray training, is a sophisticated and highly precise method of rendering light and its effect on a scene, used by visual effects artists to create film and television graphics. Full ray tracing provides the following in-game effects:
Full Ray-Traced Global Illumination:This advanced rendering technique simulates realistic lighting by tracing the paths of light rays as they collide in a scene. Unlike methods that only consider direct illumination, this approach takes into account both direct and indirect illumination and captures how light is reflected, refracted and scattered by multiple surfaces, which is particularly powerful in outdoor areas.
Full Ray-Traced Subsurface Scattering on Foliage:This improves the realism of the vegetation by simulating how light passes through the leaves and is scattered. By accurately modeling subsurface scattering—the way light enters, scatters, and exits semitransparent materials—this technique captures the natural translucency and illumination effects of leaves, particularly when backlit.
Full Ray-Traced Indoor Reflections:Simulating the physical behavior of light reflected from surfaces is a big step towards realism. Using advanced path tracing algorithms, rays from the camera are cast through each pixel and tracked as they interact with the scene's materials. Unlike traditional methods such as environment mapping or screen-space reflections, which can miss off-screen objects or create visual artifacts, path tracing takes into account all potential light paths within the entire scene, providing an incredibly high level of immersion.
Full Ray-Traced Sun Shadows:It creates realistic shadow effects by simulating how light behaves in the real world. This allows extremely realistic shadows to be simulated by calculating how light rays move from the sun to surfaces in a scene, accurately accounting for occlusion and blurring depending on distance, angle and time of day. Unlike traditional shadow mapping, which can be either too sharp or too blurry, full ray tracing allows for a smooth transition between these extremes based on the physical properties of the environment.
This brings even an RTX 4090 to its knees, but thanks to DLSS 3 and frame generation, good frame rates can still be achieved. In our test with maximum settings including DLSS 3 and frame generation, we were able to enjoy the game smoothly in 4K resolution at 90 to 115 fps. The only regret is that alternative upscalers such as AMD FSR or Intel XeSS are not yet supported. According to the patch notes, at least the AMD variant will be released soon - but when is still unclear.
If you don't have the appropriate hardware, you can stream the Steam and Microsoft Store versions of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle from the cloud with NVIDIA GeForce NOW. This also means that all ray tracing options are available. Members can also enjoy the PC Game Pass version next week.
After a long drought, there is finally a new Indy game again and we have taken a close look at it.
