How To Optimize Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Performance on PC

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has been finally released to the public, bringing a new Indy adventure to gamers. MachineGames surprised PC gamers with its strict system requirements that focus on ray tracing, but the final game runs far better than we had hoped if you know which settings to change.

Indiana Jones requires ray-tracing hardware at all times, so you won’t be able to play it on older GPUs. However, even those who have capable graphics cards may run into problems if they accidentally turn up the knob on certain settings. Fortunately, we have tested the game on a high-end gaming PC and can break down which settings affect performance the most.

Indiana Jones PC Performance Tip: Focus on VRAM

After testing the game on a PC equipped with a Geforce RTX 4080, we’ve concluded that the game’s performance relies heavily on how much VRAM you have on your GPU. Digital Foundry arrived at the same conclusion, providing some easy-to-understand optimized settings for the game on PC.

According to DF, here are the VRAM settings you need to use depending on your graphics card’s capacity:

It’s worth noting that you’ll need to account for more VRAM when using DLSS frame generation. We recommend playing at a resolution lower than your GPU’s typical output or turning off ray-tracing features. It’s clear that GPUs with less than 8 GB VRAM will struggle with the game, which is why newer graphics cards like Intel’s Arc B series include more VRAM than their competitors.

Indiana Jones Path Tracing Performance Tips

Indiana Jones is one of the few games in this generation to use path tracing, which means it uses ray tracing to calculate all of its lighting. The Full Ray Tracing toggle works on the following effects:

• Sun Shadows
• Ray Traced Reflections
• Ray Traced Global Illumination

All of these settings are demanding, with the final RTGI option being the heaviest. While turning them on improves the image quality, the performance hit is rarely worth it. At best, enabling RT reflections results in a noticeable difference, so we recommend turning it on if you have capable hardware.

Indiana Jones PC Performance Benchmarks

The game uses ray tracing at all times, but players have the option to turn on path tracing, which is more demanding on GPUs. We recommend staying away from it if they’re running an older GPU, especially lower-end cards from AMD. At the time of writing, FSR and XeSS haven’t been implemented in the game, making path tracing nearly impossible for non-NVIDIA cards.

We played the game on a PC with the following specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D
• GPU: NVIDIA Geforce RTX 4080
• RAM: 32GB DDR4 3200 MHz
• OS: Windows 11
• SSD: WD SN850 M.2 SSD

Here are the benchmarks on 1440p and 4K:

Turning down the other settings didn’t result in any significant performance improvement, making The Great Circle one of MachineGames’s most optimized PC games to date. We recommend turning most if not all, settings to their highest values if you’re running a recent graphics card.

Even after this, you’ll notice that the game suffers from constant pop-in. Unfortunately, there’s no in-game setting to fix this, but there is one trick you can use until MachineGames deploys a patch.

Press the ‘`’ key on your keyboard when in the game, and type in ‘r_lodscale 5’ to increase the level of detail. It’s definitely an unofficial workaround to fix the game’s level of detail settings, and it may result in instability in certain areas. We recommend using it only if the pop-in feels too distracting.

PC games are only going to get more demanding, as evidenced by Kingdom Come Deliverance 2’s requirements. Fortunately, Indiana Jones is a well-optimized game and we hope you can claw back some extra performance by using our guide.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is available on PC and Xbox Series X|S and it releases on PS5 in spring 2025. It is also playable through Xbox Game Pass.

If you like Indiana Jones, you’ll love these adventure games, and there are plenty of other games releasing in December to keep you busy throughout the holiday season.