Last week, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s (relatively) extremely high system requirements turned out to be one of the most talked about stories in PC hardware that week. But this week, the game is being released and Nvidia is already promoting it. The additional range of “Full Ray Tracing” graphics capabilities adds path tracing capabilities to games that are already built on top of standard ray tracing as a requirement.
In addition to providing an analysis of the optional Path Tracing RT feature, Nvidia’s post also revealed that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launched with full support for DLSS 3, including frame generation and super-resolution features. It’s clear.
It’s important to note that while the required and recommended specs for this game are certainly high, they seem to be tailored to the actual technical goals of the game. While it’s true that Great Circle uses the same id Tech 7 game engine as Doom Eternal, which eventually added RT reflections, Great Circle is primarily centered around ray-traced lighting and shading. It is similar to Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. Get started even if you don’t have path tracing/full ray tracing settings enabled.
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Where Doom Eternal aimed to be a high-performance, immersive, rip-off game experience, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is instead a more cinematic, more cinematic experience with countless easter eggs from indie legends and massive interactive levels. We aim to be realistic and immersive. It’s much more like Hitman than Call of Duty or Machine Games’ previous Wolfenstein games.
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Of the settings that can be selectively path traced, the most impactful is RTGI-style global illumination. Global illumination dramatically improves the realism of lighting by ensuring that light is reflected and reflected properly within the scene.
Combined with the path-traced sun shadow settings, you get highly realistic lighting and shading that realistically distorts, absorbs, and refracts colors depending on your surroundings. The colors visible in desert tree foliage are especially noticeable with these settings enabled compared to without them.
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Path trace settings that are very hard to notice in standard play are subsurface scattering of path traced foliage and full resolution RT reflections. First, let’s talk about reflections, but any game that requires RT as a baseline should mean RT reflections are present anyway.
Still, Nvidia’s emphasis on “full resolution” suggests that this setting may be amplifying RT reflections rather than relying on screen space technology without RT reflections. Further testing is needed to verify that. Fortunately, games have been built for decades with the assumption that they don’t perform path-traced reflections, so it’s easy to ignore this setting in most scenarios.
Subsurface scattering in path traced leaves is also an easy setting to ignore, but it’s true and looks incredibly cool. For those unfamiliar with subsurface scattering as a graphics technique, it refers to how light interacts (is scattered) beneath a particular surface. Subsurface scattering is typically used to create highly realistic human skin and facial animations. However, applying this technique to leaves allows the natural translucency and refractive properties of leaves to be reflected in the game. This is an incredibly cool and detailed setting, but if you’re struggling to hit 60 FPS, it’s probably not worth enabling.
