Earlier this week, MachineGames released the Path Tracing patch for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. So, time now to benchmark it and see how PT runs on a high-end PC system at different resolutions.
For these benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 566.14 driver. I know there is a new driver for the game. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Path Tracing for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle handles pretty much everything. Thanks to it, GI, AO, Reflections and Sun Shadows are ray-traced. And, as we’ve already said, the end result is truly amazing. With Path Tracing, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a graphical powerhouse. It looks beautiful and at times it gave me very strong “Crysis” vibes.
For our benchmarks, we used the starting jungle area. With Path Tracing, this area appeared to be more demanding than the one we used in our PC Performance Analysis.
At native resolutions, the NVIDIA RTX 4090 is only able to run PT smoothly at 1080p. At Native 1440p/Supreme/Path Tracing, we got a minimum of 46FPS and an average of 51FPS. As for Native 4K, we were below 30FPS.
By enabling DLSS 3 Quality Super Resolution, we were able to get a smooth experience at both 1080p and 1440p. However, at 4K we were getting framerates between 43-49FPS. Even with DLSS 3 Balanced Mode, we were below 60FPS at all times.
So, to get a smooth gaming experience at 4K, DLSS 3 Quality with Frame Generation is a must. By enabling FG, we were able to get a minimum of 68FPS and an average of 75FPS. Then, by dropping DLSS 3 to Balanced Mode, we were above 80FPS at all times.
To put it simply, there is no way to run Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with Path Tracing without DLSS 3 Frame Generation. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as Path Tracing is as taxing as it can be. It’s a miracle we can even run a triple-A modern game with Path Tracing.
In my opinion, the best way to experience the game with an NVIDIA RTX 4090 is with DLSS 3 Balanced and Frame Generation. With this combo, there was very minimal input latency. And, since this isn’t a fast-paced game, most of you won’t have any issues with it.
It will be interesting to see how this path-traced game will run on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. According to rumors, this new high-end GPU will be noticeably faster than the RTX 4090. However, you should temper your expectations. It will NOT be able to run modern-day path-traced games at Native 4K.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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4k dlss balanced with frame gen at 80 fps is indeed a playable experience. Here’s hoping the 5090 can do the same but 100+ gps with dlss quality + FG.
They need to enable the PT options for non RTX GPUs faster.
If only to fix the sh*ty raster shadows.
When nvidia launched their "Ampere" GPUs I did not think we would be able to play PT games so fast, but "Ada Lovelace" made it possible thanks to not only offering massive RT gains but also DLSS FG. All PT games requires DLSS FG to get smooth fps at 4K DLSS (4K like image quality) but I dont mind using it since this technology works so well (without vsync input latency is close to placebo, unlike FSR FG that introduce more noticeable lag and judder) . DlSS FG can trully transform the expereience not only in PT games, but also demanding (and CPU intensive) raster games like Warhammer space marine 2. I thought 80-100fps in Warhammer Space Marine 2 was good enough for me, but with the FG patch the game became so extremely smooth that it made combat much more enjoyable.
The RTX5090 will probably offer twice the performance of my card, so it should run PT games at 4K DLSS even without FG. I cant wait to see benchmarks. John, are you going to buy the RTX5090?
Nah, he's smart. He's been making articles shilling for the free 4090 he got and that 'top gaming experience' to make sure Nvidia notices and grants him a free RTX 5090 to 'review.'
I dont care if he will buy the RTX5090 with his own money, or if "Santa Claus" will give him this card. Not many sites are willing to write such detailed benchmark articles as John (there's one russian site gamegpu, but I dont trust them :P), he covered almost every AAA game and that helped me decide which CPU and GPU to get.
How do you have a copy of this game that magically works properly? Because the gamepass version is still riddled with issues that countless others are mentioning on Reddit as well.
On my 13700KF/4080 PC, as soon as the game boots, it's around 10 FPS until I go into the graphics settings and toggle DLSS off and on again and then have to toggle between DLSS quality and High Performance and back to quality to get the video card to start getting used properly by the game (I literally don't hear my video card fan kick in at all until I do this, apparently a glitch with this Motor/IDsoft engine and nvidia's latest drivers). And this is after having to go into the .config file and add command lines to force exclusive fullscreen so DLSS framegen works. After all that, it does run at nearly 60+ FPS with graphics maxed at 4k DLSS quality and full PT.
question…. why do you got the game on gamepass?
I ask myself the same question as I end up having to torrent the steam version of games when gamepass pulls this crap.. I'm definitely not going to renew when my subscription runs out.
The funny thing is, yesterday Nvidia released an over-the-air update to add the gamepass API ID of this game to the Nvidia profile so frame gen and other driver optimizations would work…and it made it run even worse somehow.
The 6090Ti will be enough.