I just upgraded my GPU, but Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's PC requirements are still making me sweat with their eye-watering demands

What you need to know

• A few days ahead of the launch of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Xbox and Windows PC, Bethesda and MachineGames have revealed its official PC system requirements and recommended specs.
• The requirements are extremely demanding, with the action-adventure title requiring at least an Intel Core i7-10700K and an NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER for playing at 1080p. Also, having a ray tracing-capable GPU is a hard requirement since the game has partial ray tracing you can't disable.
• The rest of the requirements and recommended specs are similarly advanced, with some of the most notable ones being the need for an RTX 3080 Ti for 1440p High and an RTX 4090 if you want to play at 4K Ultra with full ray tracing.
• To hit most of the performance targets, you'll also need a hefty 32GB of RAM. Across the board, 120GB of SSD storage is also necessary.

The official PC system requirements for MachineGames' hotly anticipated action-adventure game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are here, and they're...well, they're certainly something. I figured the Xbox and PC exclusive wasn't going to be easy to run given its impressive graphics, but I was hardly expecting hardware demands as brutal as what I'm about to go over below.

The requirements — recently posted by Bethesda on the company's social media channels — start at a Intel Core i7-10700K and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER for 60 FPS at 1080p with Low settings, with the list noting that there's a hard requirement for ray tracing-capable GPUs since Indiana Jones has partial ray tracing you can't disable. At a time when most minimum requirements can still be met with processors many years old and GPUs like the GTX 1060, 1070, and 1660, this immediately forecasts how painful the rest of the recommended specs are.

Moving up to the performance target of 60 FPS at 1440p High skyrockets the requirements to a Core i7-12700K and an RTX 3080 Ti, and also propels the required RAM up to 32GB from 16GB. 4K Ultra, meanwhile, demands the use of an i9-13900K and an RTX 4080. It should be noted that these requirements don't take upscaling and frame generation tech like DLSS 3 into account, but still...oh, and I hope you've got room on your SSD, because Indy needs 120GB of it. Good lord, man.

The eye-watering list of requisite hardware doesn't stop there, though. If you want to enable full ray tracing for maxed-out visual quality, the GPU requirements begin at 1080p with an RTX 4070 — a card intended for high-end 1440p gaming — and that's with upscaling and frame generation. Full ray tracing at 1440p High requires an RTX 4080, and to enjoy it at 4K Ultra, you'll need NVIDIA's luxurious ~$1,500-$2,000 flagship RTX 4090; anything less, and you can probably kiss any chance of good performance goodbye.

Frankly, these requirements are ridiculous, and I'm very surprised to see them coming from the developers that made the well-optimized and accessible Wolfenstein games. They've got me worried I won't be able to manage a consistent 60 FPS on High settings even though I upgraded to an RTX 4070 Ti SUPER a few short weeks ago, as while it's considerably more performant than the recommended RTX 3080 Ti, I also play with an 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor that's a fair bit more demanding than a regular 1440p panel. I'm using an i5-12600K CPU, too, which is a rung below the listed i7-12700K.

The decision to go all-in with advanced ray tracing and force players to partially use it is no doubt the reason we're seeing requirements this high. And given that the most recent Steam hardware survey indicates that only a small percentage of users have the recommended GPU or something roughly equivalent to it, I don't think it's going to go over well with PC gamers.

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These requirements also have me concerned about how the title will perform on Xbox Series X and especially the Xbox Series S, though it is important to note that console and PC graphics hardware isn't directly comparable due to console-specific optimizations and architectural differences. Still, there's valid reason to worry, and I wouldn't be surprised if it runs terribly on even the best gaming handhelds, either.

We'll find out soon enough when Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launches on December 9, but if you ask me, this is definitely a game you should wait on buying until you read reviews and performance analyses. If you've got Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass, though, you can jump in on day one without the risk of being unhappy with your purchase.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is scheduled to launch on Dec. 9, 2024 across Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC, with a PlayStation 5 version coming in 2025. Like all Xbox first-party games, it's included in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Anyone that buys the Premium Edition of the game gets three-day early access. For more information, consult our Indiana Jones and the Great Circle preorder guide.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indy is back, and he'll need all his wits in order to solve a mystery spanning the Earth. As usual, nefarious Nazis stand in his way, but that's nothing his whip and revolver can't solve. Ancient puzzles? Easy! Snakes? Well...we'll see.

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