Indiana Jones and the Great Circle NVIDIA RTX 4090 Performance

Written by John Yan on 1/20/2025 for PC  

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is here and NVIDIA, of course, is helping make the game look the best it can be. Teased in January of 2021, the game  looks absolutely stunning and offers up a great Indiana Jones story. Our reviewer really loved the game and you can read his full review here. I will be looking at the performance of the game using a GeForce RTX 4090 and an AMD 9800X3D. This will be my first look at a game with this hardware combo, so we’re going to turn everything up to the max and see how well this will run as well as check out the performance with Ray Tracing and DLSS3.

Full Ray Tracing or Path Tracing wasn’t implemented when I was given access to the game, but it became available pretty quickly afterwards though and right before the full launch. Path Tracing provides a higher quality, more accurate representation of light and its reaction to surfaces and that’s an important feature of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The movies and this game highly utilize the environment with the architecture and the illumination of the scene or area of the game to draw you into the world. There’s a sense of wonder and awe with Indy as he explores areas that haven’t been inhabited in a very long time or areas that are hidden away from everyone and only accessible by a few people.

I played through the entire game using Full Ray Tracing and it was such a fun visual experience. Yes, there are a few areas that had some issues. For example, while you are in a boat underneath a dock in the Sukhothai listening to Sunan talk to the Nazis, there’s parts of the boards that have light bleeding through. Depending on how you move your view around, the light flickers pretty badly. That was at the time I was playing and maybe this visual bug was fixed later on, but that was one example that stood out to me.

As you progress through the story, you’ll encounter a ton of great environments that really take advantage of dynamic lighting. The areas are diverse ranging from dark, dingy ruins that are lit by a few torches to the misty dense jungles as well as brightly lit deserts near the Sphinx and pyramids. It’s one of the more visually appealing games of the past calendar year.

For testing, I upgraded my CPU from the AMD 7800X3D to the 9800X3D. As the title states, I’ll be running the game with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 and running at 4K. Here are the specs of my machine:

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6000 PC5-48000 CL30
ASRock B65-E PG Riptide WiFi motherboard
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Samsung 990 Pro 4TB SSD
LG OLED42C2PUA 42"

Let’s start with the baseline test. No ray tracing features were turned on and the only thing I turned off was motion blur from the defaults. DLSS settings were tested in both Quality and Balanced mode. I ran three tests of walking through the jungle at the beginning of the game to get a consistent area to test in and averaged the scores.

 

Even with no DLSS enabled and at 4K, this game runs really well. At 1% lows of around 95fps, you can be sure that you'll get a smooth performance with an RTX 4090 without enabling any features for extra performance gains. But, there are some issues.

You see, the game does do some dynamic texture loading and at a distance that's not too far from Indy, a lower resolution texture is loaded in first before a higher one replaces it as you get closer. Lighting is also higher quality the closer you are if you're not using RTX. Take this picture for example.

You can see how there's blurry area past a certain point on the window light that's reflected on the floor. It's pretty jarring to be honest. But when you turn on Full Ray Tracing, this is what you see.

This looks a lot more realistic and won't knock you out of the immersion of the game. But how much of an impact does the performance take when enabling Full Ray Tracing?

Compared to no Ray Tracing at all, it's a huge drop. We're talking an average of 117.97 FPS with 1% lows of 97.19 to an average of 29.76 fps with 1% lows at 26.36. Even with DLSS enabled, it's not going to make a smooth gaming experience. That's where Frame Generation comes in.

First let's see without any DLSS, what Frame Generation can do.

Without RTX on and Frame Generation with and without DLSS, you're getting some really good FPS. It's not something you need to turn on without RTX though as the game's running pretty fast as it is. But, let's see what it's like with RTX on and DLSS3 enabled.

Here now we get gamplay above the 60fps threshold and you'll get the best lighting experience as well.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle plays really well without RTX enabled on the GeForce RTX 4090, but even Full Path Ray Tracing can drop the performance on this monster card when enabled at 4K. With DLSS and Frame Generation, you can get back a lot of the performance and get a great visual experience as well.