Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is shaping up to be one of my favourite games of all time, capturing the look and feel of the classic movies – and its rendering plays a big part in that. The standard game ships with a form of ray-traced global illumination, but Machine Games has gone one step further for the PC version, delivering a ray tracing upgrade. This turns an already great-looking game into an even better one, often bridging the gap between RTGI and full offline rendering. It has its limitations – which we’ll go into – but overall, it’s a spectacular upgrade. Yes, it can be demanding on hardware, but you can still enjoy the lion’s share of the benefits on RTX 4070-class hardware at 1440p resolution.
The nature of full RT is that it automatically ‘fixes’ a lot of the issues in the standard game renderer and one of the most glaring is its shadows – or more specifically, the cascaded shadow maps cast from the sun or the moon. Moving forward and backward in the game shows big visual discontinuities, flipping between blocky shadow map representations very close to the camera in a highly distracting way. Full RT fixes that, greatly enhancing shadows quality, realism and detail.
The ‘popping’ shadow map cascade problem disappears completely, while also reducing aliased noise in the shadows close up to the player camera, most obviously seen in the jungle sections. Without full RT, shadow maps cannot resolve final detail from the trees, so details pop in and out of existence on each frame. RT shadows present all the detail from the leaves and branches above, with full soft shadow detail and none of the awkward aliasing or popping found in the base game. Also, the basic nature of RT tech ensures you get accurate penumbral effects: shadows close to the casting object are sharp, becoming more diffuse the further away from the object they are.
Small detail also benefits: Indiana Jones and Great Circle has a lot of high quality geometry and often, objects in the game are either excluded from the shadow map pass or they are far too small for the shadow map to resolve correctly or accurately. RT sun shadows, on the other hand, are calculated on a per-pixel basis, giving each and every rivet, blade of grass or little trinket perfectly sharp and accurate self-shadows, capable of dramatically increasing the object’s apparent quality and material look.