Launching on December 9, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the latest Indiana Jones video game—but unlike past games, it's utilizing the latest id Tech 7 engine (also used by Doom Eternal) and being developed by Machine Games of modern Wolfenstein fame. Due to shipping with ray tracing as a minimum requirement, publisher Bethesda has revealed that the system requirements across the board are fairly demanding.
With ray tracing as a minimum requirement, GPUs without the feature have been left out entirely, and for "full ray tracing" or path tracing configurations, Machine Games doesn't even bother to mention AMD GPUs. Even minimum CPU requirements are pretty high— an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i7-10700K was enough for 144 Hz gaming. Still, it is only recommended for minimum settings configurations targeting 60 FPS. Though considering that the CPU requirements don't seem to change between the "Full Ray Tracing" enabled and Disabled requirements, they may be slightly inflated without "Full Ray Tracing."
The GPU requirements are somewhat more reasonable because this game is designed around hardware ray tracing as a requirement. While some describe this as "the first AAA game to require ray tracing," I think they're forgetting or being a little dismissive of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, which similarly doesn't support GPUs without ray tracing support. That game requires an Nvidia RTX 2060 baseline, whereas Great Circle requires an Nvidia RTX 2060 Super, AMD RX 6600, or Intel Arc A580. By modern standards, these GPU requirements are to be expected for a game that requires some level of ray tracing enabled at all times.
Things start getting a little more serious when we begin looking at Recommended requirements and up, including the separate "Full Ray Tracing" requirements. On the processing end, 32GB of RAM and high-end, modern Ryzen 7 or Intel Core i7 chips are required. Recommended settings without path tracing demand an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti-tier GPU, while Those with path tracing demand an RTX 4080.
Once we move onto Ultra settings with path tracing, most of even the best gaming GPUs, need not apply— only an RTX 4090 is considered suitable for the task. Ultra without path tracing is at least more reasonable, ideal for an RTX 4080 or an RX 7900 XT, but these are still astronomically higher requirements than we're used to.
That said, early impressions of the game are positive, which may justify these requirements for those who play it. With a focus on cinematic visuals and deeply immersive gameplay with elements of stealth FPS an ala Machine Game's prior work on Wolfenstein and deeply immersive, wide-open levels like those seen in the modern Hitman games, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle seems equipped to leverage its monstrous system requirements to turn around what easily looks to be the best Indiana Jones game ever made. Maybe it'll even be better than Uncharted 2.
