Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Reveals PC System Requirements, Including Ray Tracing That Can’t Be Disabled and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 for H...

[Tsing]

Bethesda has announced that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is on track for release on December 9, and with it comes a PC specs chart that shows what kind of hardware will be required for various quality settings in MachineGames' new action-adventure game, including those for standard rendering and full ray tracing.

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[Peter_Brosdahl]

RT that can't be disabled, that ought to go over like a lead balloon.

 

[Zarathustra]

Of course it is always on and can't be disabled.

If developers have to spend time during raster "tricks" like shadow mapping, it takes them like 3-4 times more work to design a scene than with RT.

I'm surprised every last dev doesn't do this yet.

I guess they have to balance it against how many people won't buy the game because of it.

(And I imagine this won't bee too popular with owners of pre-7000 series Radeons.)

I tend to think RT is a resource intensive waste that we didn't need, but it is here to stay no matter what.

 

[Zarathustra]

All of that said, I am not usually a fan of games based on non-game franchises, but I could see myself making an exception to try this one.


Maybe down the road, steeply discounted during a Steam sale.

 

[DrezKill]

I'm surprised every last dev doesn't do this yet.

Cuz the hardware is still early gen (nVidia is only on 3rd-gen RT hardware), the installed base is not large enough, and real-time RT hasn't been around long enough. In time it will become a normal standard feature. 4A Games already said they will be building off what they did for Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, with their next game being 100% ray-tracing all the time.

If developers have to spend time during raster "tricks" like shadow mapping, it takes them like 3-4 times more work to design a scene than with RT.

And it produces more accurate results than faking. For example, no need for Ambient Occlusion as a specific feature, because ray-traced lighting produces natural ambient occlusion. 4A Games provided an excellent example for DF's video on Metro Exodus EE of how much less manual lighting work is needed for scenes compared to ray-tracing.

I tend to think RT is a resource intensive waste that we didn't need, but it is here to stay no matter what.

At this early point it is, but it won't be forever. And I look forward to the day when it's just a normal everyday feature that all games use but which no one talks about cuz it is too common, like tessellation or screen-space reflections. I've come to appreciate a lot of things about ray-tracing, from reflections showing everything that's in the environment even if said objects are not on-screen (it always bothered me with screen-space reflections how as soon as the object being reflected is no longer on-screen, then the reflection disappears too), light coming from light sources matches the shape of those light sources (i.e. no more spherical point lights coming from long tube-shaped light bulbs), global illumination with bounce lighting that picks up color information from surface, more accurate shadows, more accurate refraction of light through transparent objects, etc.

RT that can't be disabled, that ought to go over like a lead balloon.

Cuz at least with Metro Exodus you had the option of using the normal version, or the Enhanced Edition that requires RT hardware. It seems waaaaaay too early for new to be requiring RT hardware at this point.

 

[Zarathustra]

Cuz the hardware is still early gen (nVidia is only on 3rd-gen RT hardware), the installed base is not large enough, and real-time RT hasn't been around long enough. In time it will become a normal standard feature. 4A Games already said they will be building off what they did for Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, with their next game being 100% ray-tracing all the time.

Really? How many people are actually still playing on pre- RTX 2000 series GPU's?

Pre-RX7000 series AMD GPU's might also be a problem, but AMD's market share hhas absolutely fallen off a cliff in th elast few generations, probably largely just because of the lack of RT performance.

If you go into one of the many "PC Maser Race" type of groups on social media where the kids hang out these days, the general consensus tends to be all nvidia all the time, with only a notable number of small exceptions who use AMD GPU's.

I would argue that install base for RT support is nearly universal now. Yes, the performance isn't there on the lower end models, but the message is that that is "solved" by upscaling and frame generation.

 

[Brian_B]

Really? How many people are actually still playing on pre- RTX 2000 series GPU's?

Just eyeballing it, roughly 1/3 of Steam gamers, at least.

So it's not huge, but I wouldn't call it insignificant either. But since I imagine their target is moreso console sales than PC sales... I don't think it's a huge consideration as both the consoles now support RT.

 

[Brent_Justice]

RT that can't be disabled, that ought to go over like a lead balloon.

Except it isn't new, many games based on UE5, like Avatar, utilize Ray Tracing by default, and you can't turn it off, it's native to the game. Granted, it runs in a software mode, on cards that don't support hardware ray tracing, but the fact is, this is not a new concept.

In addition, it is reminiscent of things like Mesh Shaders being required for Alan Wake 2, and the game not running on cards that didn't support Mesh Shaders in hardware.

As technology progresses, it is standard practice for new games/engines to require hardware support for things. We should want this, for the state of progression and technology in the gaming experience.

It is of no surprise, that Ray Tracing would one day, become a requirement. If we truly want games to have native Ray Tracing engines, and move away from rasterization, then this is the way.