MachineGames of Wolfenstein fame has been doing some great work as of late, and the team is breaking new ground with its latest release Indiana Jones and the Great Circle which is a far cry from what the developer is used to. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is all about taking part in a never-ending thrill ride through frigid mountains and excavated digsites and much more.
Furthermore, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle also mark the first time that id Tech engine has been natively updated for the current generation of consoles, and it’s definitely a looker. But how does it achieve that visual presentation, and what’s exactly going under the hood? We will be answering these questions in depth while also taking a look at the changes between Xbox Series X and PC.
Engine details
As mentioned previously, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is built using the id Tech 7 engine – probably an advanced version of the same engine that powered last-gen hits like DOOM Eternal. It’s a powerful engine that provides a great balance between fidelity and performance and is known to scale well across a wide variety of hardware.
The engine might not break new ground in terms of rendering techniques, but it is definitely a considerable improvement over what we saw in the previous generation. Right from detailed character animations to impressive environment detail and a robust post-processing pipeline, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle brings forth a strong visual presentation.
Test PC Specs and PC Graphical Settings
For our tests, we went with a test bench comprising a Ryzen 9 5950X, an Nvidia RTX 3080Ti, and 32 GB of RAM which is a tad below compared to what the developers have recommended for Supreme Settings. The performance was surprisingly good but more on this in a bit.
Taking a look at the settings menu, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle presents players with a wealth of options and sliders to tinker around with and find the perfect fit between performance and fidelity. You can use both presets or play around with options related to reflection quality, and texture pool size to find out what fits your purpose. In addition to these options, the game also supports Nvidia’s DLSS and Super Resolution which can help clean up the image quality by a further margin.
Given our test bench specs, it made sense to go with Ultra settings which is a notch below Supreme. The resolution was set to native 4K with dynamic resolution scaling turned off. We did use DLSS Super Resolution which was turned to Quality.
PC Performance
We played through a good chunk of the game on PC, and the game performs pretty well across a bunch of different scenarios. PC performance was largely stable, and the game had little to no issues hitting the target 60fps. The world streaming system works pretty well, and LoD swapping happens smoothly without many visible artifacts – and frame-rate chugs along smoothly in both cramped areas and large open areas.
But that doesn’t mean that it is flawless though. We noticed split-second frame drops, and that seems to be caused whenever there are a lot of volumetric post-processing effects on screen. It’s pretty minor, and might even be related to optimization issues – but it’s definitely a bit of observation that needs to be noted. But in broad strokes, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle performed pretty well and if prior id Tech games are anything to go by, it should scale well across a wide variety of hardware.
Xbox Series X Performance
The Xbox Series X version features a mode that runs at 60 fps with an output resolution of 4K. We put the game to its paces, and it performed pretty welll. Performance was quite optimized and stable, and resolution scaling was not really noticeable while playing.
The Xbox Series X most likely renders the game at a lower internal resolution, and the image is then upscaled to the target of native 4K. It seems to be using some sort of FXAA or MSAA for clearing up the image on the console, and while upscaling artifacts might not be very clear – they definitely do exist.
Overall, MachineGames has done some great work providing a performant release with this rendition of id Tech. Having a second 40fps mode that matches the level of graphical fidelity seen in the PC release would have been a great addition, and hopefully this is something that the developer may look into with a post launch patch.
Various Graphical Parameters
Starting things off with the character models, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle features really good-looking character models that are appropriately detailed and expressive. The polycounts are appropriately high, and meshes react well to changes in expression. It’s all built on top of what came before with Wolfenstein, but a better motion capturing and rendering budget has made the characters look pretty good in close-up cinematic shots.
Hair rendering has also seen improvements, with fine-grained details clearly visible without much artifacting. Physically based materials have also been used for costumes – giving Indiana Jones and the Great Circle a very well-rounded look, especially with the additional cinematic lights that are used in cutscenes.
Coming over to the environments, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle marks a big departure from the developer’s previous works. Gone are the huge Nazi megastructures that serve as architectural marvels which have been replaced by sprawling levels with an impressive amount of variety between each stage. The id Tech engine was always great at rendering levels at scale, but Indiana Jones adds a level of richness that wasn’t present before.
Assets are a lot more colourful this time around, thanks to the extensive use of high-quality foliage in the jungle levels. The quality of assets is great all around, right from natural elements like trees and rocks to artificial geometry like brick walls and carved stones and much more. Then there’s the lighting where we get to see what looks to be a similar implementation to Wolfenstein 2.
id Tech uses a mix of baked lighting and dynamic bounce lighting for indirect lighting. It works with great effect over here since Indiana Jones isn’t an open world with dynamic times of day or tons of indirect light sources spread across the level and also helps with giving the developer greater freedom over the look and feel of each scene.
As for the reflections, Indiana Jones seems to be using screen space reflections which have an appropriately high resolution on the reflected image and updates in real time. Shadows are also similarly a mix of baked and dynamic, and they are rendered at far distances from the camera which gives the game a pretty uniform look all around.
Finally, there’s the post-processing aspect of the presentation where we get to see an improved volumetric light system. Beams of light penetrate through the trees, and generous smoke volumes can be seen used to both mask faraway details and add depth to the surroundings. A high-quality per-object motion blur is also used along with the usual depth-of-field effects, and the combo works just as well as it did for the engine’s previous fast-paced combat titles – rounding off an amazing presentation.
Xbox Series X vs PC
Much like prior games built on id Tech, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is largely the same game across both platforms – though there are a few iterative differences that we can make between our PC version running on the aforementioned settings and Xbox Series X.
The PC version inches a couple of shades ahead from the Xbox version in terms of image quality, which isn’t surprising considering we are also using Nvidia’s DLSS Super Resolution. Textures look a bit crisper as a result but there isn’t much of a difference between the rendering techniques used in both releases. In broad strokes, the Xbox version of the game is very close to the High preset on the PC.
Overall, both versions of the game look pretty similar to one another which isn’t surprising considering the excellent scalability of the engine used. Xbox players get a great experience that balances both visual fidelity and performance, while PC players get to push resolution and textures to a further degree.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is yet another great game from MachineGames. Despite being way out of the developer’s comfort zone, the team has crafted a compelling experience that captures the spirit of thrill and adventure of the genre. The id Tech engine might not reinvent the wheel in terms of rendering techniques, but it produces some great results – not just from a visual perspective but also from a performance standpoint.
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