Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 5% fps cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we recommend Texture Quality at High (5% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: id Tech 7 uses megatextures that scale significantly with VRAM — 12GB covers max 1440p comfortably; 16GB is needed for max 4K. Reducing Texture Pool Size (Impressive→High) at 4K recovers ~10% GPU performance with minimal visual change.

Typical impact 8-25% · 10% fps cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: id Tech 7 uses cascaded shadow maps for the directional sun light alongside a shadow atlas for local lights. At Impressive, cascade resolution is high and the far cascade extends well across the outdoor Egyptian and Italian environments, keeping sharp shadow detail on distant palm trees and colonnades. Dropping to Medium reduces cascade resolution and shortens the far cascade — shadow edges soften noticeably on ground-plane contact shadows in bright outdoor areas. The saving is 8–15% GPU frame time, making this a worthwhile reduction on mid-range hardware.

Typical impact 15-40% · 16% fps cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we recommend Global Illumination at High (16% fps cost).

The most comprehensive indirect lighting system, simulating full multi-bounce light transport. Modern implementations include UE5 Lumen (software screen-space radiance cache with optional hardware RT acceleration), path tracing (stochastic ray tracing with multiple bounces per pixel), and hybrid systems combining screen-space probes with signed distance field tracing. Lumen software mode uses a screen-space radiance cache updated via compute shaders plus SDF traces, while hardware RT mode dispatches actual ray tracing calls through RT cores. This is typically the single heaviest setting in any game.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: This governs id Tech 7's screen-space and probe-based indirect lighting system used when full ray tracing is disabled. At Impressive, probe density is high and the indirect bounce contribution is updated more frequently, producing richer ambient fill in the shadowed interiors of temples and catacombs. At Low, the system falls back to a coarser probe grid with less frequent updates — indirect lighting becomes noticeably flat in enclosed spaces like the Gizeh burial chambers. Cost range is 15–30% depending on scene complexity; this is the second most expensive rasterised setting after shadow quality.

Typical impact 5-18% · 6% fps cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we recommend Volumetric Fog at High (6% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The game uses a froxel-based volumetric lighting pass to render the dusty haze inside tombs, the morning mist over the Nile, and the smoky interiors of Vatican halls. At Impressive, froxel grid resolution is higher and more in-scattered light samples are taken per cell, giving god-ray shafts through doorways a dense, convincing quality. Dropping to Low reduces grid resolution and cuts step count, making fog boundaries blockier and light shafts less defined. Cost is 5–12% GPU — meaningful enough to adjust on cards with limited fill-rate headroom.

Typical impact 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we recommend Water Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Governs the fidelity of water surface rendering including wave simulation, tessellation, refraction, and reflection techniques. Higher settings enable GPU-computed FFT wave simulation in compute shaders, adaptive tessellation for displacement mapping on the water mesh, screen-space refraction via distorted depth buffer sampling, and planar or screen-space reflections. The reflection pass may render the scene a second time from a mirrored viewpoint, effectively doubling draw calls for visible water surfaces.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Water surfaces appear in the Gizeh riverbank sequences and several courtyard fountains. At Impressive, the water shader uses FFT-based wave displacement with screen-space reflections and accurate refraction sampling of the depth buffer below the surface. At Low, wave geometry is simplified and reflections fall back to a static cubemap probe. Given how limited water coverage is in most of the game's environments, dropping from Impressive to High is nearly invisible and recovers 3–6% frame time. Only in the river-side sequences is the quality difference clearly visible.

Typical impact 8-20% · 3% fps cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we recommend Hair Quality at High (3% fps cost).

Controls strand-based hair rendering systems such as UE5 Groom, TressFX, or proprietary solutions. Higher settings increase the number of simulated hair strands (potentially 30,000-100,000), each rendered as a screen-space line or tessellated tube. The GPU cost comes from per-strand physics simulation in compute shaders, heavy overdraw from thousands of semi-transparent primitives requiring order-independent transparency sorting, and dedicated per-strand shadow map generation.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: MachineGames uses strand-based hair rendering for Indy and key NPCs, leveraging id Tech 7's compute-shader hair simulation pipeline. At Impressive, a high strand count is simulated with per-strand physics responding to movement and wind, rendered with deep-opacity-map shadows. The overdraw cost from thousands of semi-transparent strand primitives is significant — 10–18% GPU frame time in character-heavy scenes. Dropping to Medium reduces strand count and switches to a simpler opacity-map shadow, visibly simplifying the look of Indy's hair but recovering meaningful frame time, particularly in cut-scenes.

Typical impact 3-12% · 7% fps cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at High (7% fps cost).

Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between LOD tiers. The engine uses screen-space projected size or distance-based heuristics to swap between high-poly and simplified meshes. Higher settings push these transition distances further, keeping detailed geometry on screen longer. This increases total triangle count, draw calls, and vertex buffer memory. In UE5 titles using Nanite, this controls the aggressiveness of the virtual geometry streaming system.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Controls how aggressively id Tech 7 transitions world geometry between LOD tiers across the game's large exterior environments — the Egyptian dig sites, Vatican plazas, and Thai jungle sections. At Impressive, high-detail meshes remain loaded further from the camera, keeping complex stone carvings and structural props fully detailed throughout. At Low, LOD transitions happen close to the camera and are noticeable on mid-distance props. The cost is 5–12% depending on environment density — outdoor Egyptian areas with dense prop populations benefit most from reducing this setting.

Typical impact 20-50% · no measurable cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the recommended preset leaves Ray Tracing off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing via DXR or Vulkan RT extensions, dispatching rays from the GPU RT cores through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure built over scene geometry. Depending on the implementation, RT may cover reflections (tracing reflection rays from glossy surfaces), shadows (tracing shadow rays toward light sources for pixel-perfect hard/soft shadows), ambient occlusion (short-range visibility rays), and global illumination (multi-bounce path tracing). Each feature adds its own ray budget — a single pixel might dispatch 1-8 rays. BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection testing occur on dedicated RT hardware, but shading the hit points runs on standard compute units.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: RT Global Illumination adds substantial visual quality to the game's period environments and ruins. id Tech 7's RT implementation is efficient by id Software standards but still costs 25–42% FPS. DLSS Frame Gen on RTX 40+ largely offsets this.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: DLSS 2/3 Super Resolution is the primary image quality upscaler in The Great Circle, running on Tensor Cores on RTX hardware. Quality mode renders at ~67% native and is effectively indistinguishable from native in motion given the game's TAA base. Balanced (~58%) is the practical sweet spot for 1440p cards targeting 60+ fps with ray tracing enabled. Performance mode (~50%) is viable at 4K on RTX 40-series paired with Frame Generation but introduces softness on fine stone texture detail in close-up exploration sequences. Non-NVIDIA users have no equivalent upscaling path in this title.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the recommended preset leaves Frame Generation off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Synthesizes entirely new intermediate frames between real rendered frames using optical flow analysis. DLSS Frame Generation (NVIDIA Ada+) uses the Optical Flow Accelerator hardware to compute per-pixel motion between consecutive frames, then a neural network generates a synthetic frame by warping and blending the two surrounding real frames. AMD FSR Frame Generation uses a software-based optical flow compute shader implementation. The generated frame is inserted between real frames, effectively doubling perceived framerate. The trade-off is approximately 1 frame of additional display latency and potential artifacts on fast-moving objects where optical flow estimation fails.

In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: DLSS 3 Frame Gen is exclusive to RTX 40+ series here — no FSR 3 FG equivalent. With it enabled, RTX 4090 owners can sustain 140fps+ at 4K/max settings, making this one of the best DLSS 3 FG showcases.