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Ancient tombs might be filled with all sorts of deadly traps, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stop to admire the scenery while you’re at it. With first-person action-adventure epic Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, you get to do just that as you travel the world and take in the sights and sounds of the virtual environments you visit, from the scorching deserts of Gizeh, the magnificent halls of the Vatican City, to the lush forest greenery of Sukhothai, among others.
To further enhance the immersion and visual fidelity of this game based on the iconic cinematic adventurer, publisher Bethesda Softworks and developer MachineGames have teamed up with NVIDIA to deliver Full Ray Tracing and NVIDIA DLSS 3 on the title, not only pushing the limits of in-engine graphics to further blur the lines between visual effects and reality but also taking advantage of AI-assisted upscaling technologies to ensure smooth framerates to accompany the striking visuals.
With full ray tracing, also known as path tracing, elements in a scene including lighting, shadows and reflections can be more accurately rendered to mimic how they work in the real world, providing a graphically demanding but highly realistic enhancement for moment-to-moment gameplay. With the power of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, coupled with NVIDIA DLSS 3’s performance multiplier, players now have the power to enjoy Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in its fullest high-definition glory, with all the bells and whistles in tow.
Here’s a rundown of every effect players can enjoy with the activation of full ray tracing:
Full Ray-Traced Global Illumination
This advanced rendering technique traces the path of light rays as they bounce around a scene, incorporating both direct and indirect lighting to simulate how light reflects, refracts, and scatters off multiple surfaces. Using this technology, indoor areas appear significantly better lit, with enhanced amounts of ambient occlusion, which is the simulation of the soft shadows that naturally occur on surfaces due to indirect or ambient lighting. This is especially prevalent in the areas between geometry, which when combined with colour bleeding, a phenomenon where an object’s colours are reflected onto nearby surfaces, results in immersive scenes that closely resemble real-world lighting.
Full Ray-Traced Subsurface Scattering on Foliage
Subsurface scattering is a technology used on elements of vegetation throughout the game that can realistically simulate how light will naturally penetrate and diffuse on surfaces like leaves. This technique takes into account the translucency of objects in real-time instead of categorising every object as an opaque element, enabling more lifelike integration of foliage into every scene.
Full Resolution Ray-Traced Reflections
Unlike traditional methods to model surface reflections like environmental mapping or screen space data calculations, full-resolution ray-traced reflections make use of path-tracing algorithms, taking into account every potential light path within an indoor scene and how each ray of light gets reflected or refracted across the environment, realistically modelling complex effects such as glossy reflections, diffuse interreflections, and specular highlights.
Fully Ray-Traced Sun Shadows
Finally, fully ray-traced sun shadows enable the realistic rendering of shadow effects, especially present in the sun-kissed deserts of Gizeh. This technology not only simulates how the sun casts shadows over objects but also considers different factors such as distance, angle and time of day, which applies subtle changes like shadow softness and occlusion in real time, allowing for the fluid transition of shadow sharpness depending on the environment.
NVIDIA DLSS 3
Enabling the full suite of Ray-Tracing enhancements can be taxing on the system, and here’s where NVIDIA DLSS 3 comes into play. First introduced in 2020, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an image upscaler that uses neural rendering to examine thousands of frames from a video game to estimate what they should look like at a higher resolution. By then running games at a lower resolution and using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to upscale the image, NVIDIA DLSS enhances the game’s performance without overly sacrificing image quality.
With the evolution of technology, NVIDIA DLSS continues to improve over the years. Its latest iteration, NVIDIA DLSS 3, builds upon NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution and adds Optical Multi Frame Generation to generate entirely new frames, integrating NVIDIA Reflex low latency technology for optimal responsiveness. NVIDIA DLSS 3 takes advantage of the new fourth-generation Tensor Cores and Optical Flow Accelerator on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs to provide a substantial boost to performance and stability while maintaining the best image quality possible, to provide players with silky-smooth framerates, even with every graphical setting turned up to eleven.
NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation
As a feature exclusive to GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation is an AI-powered graphics technology that further boosts game performance by generating additional frames and integrating NVIDIA Reflex for optimal responsiveness. The result? A massive increase of up to four times the frame rate, even during situations when the game is bottlenecked by the CPU.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle joins the ranks of over 600 apps and games that support RTX technologies, with even more NVIDIA DLSS integrations to come in the future. To kick start your journey fueled by RTX and NVIDIA DLSS, make sure to install the latest Game Ready Drivers, which gets your system ready to enjoy games in its definitive experience.
Choosing the perfect rig to run Indiana Jones and the Great Circle can be tricky business, but thankfully, the MSI Stealth 16 AI Studio has got you covered. Outfitted with a beefy NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, alongside an Intel Core Ultra 9 Processor 185H, packed with the Intel AI Boost NPU (Neural Processing Unit) with 542 TOPS (Trillion or Tera Operations Per Second), this slick laptop provides enough horsepower to enjoy both fluid gameplay and smooth content creation. Coupled with its 16-inch 120Hz Mini LED display with UHD+ resolution, you can immerse yourself in the shoes of Indy as he explores the overgrown temples of Sukhothai, all while marvelling at its vibrant, natural colours along the way.
Check out our gaming benchmark for this beast of a system here:
What’s more, there’s no better time to kick start your journey into the realm of Ray Tracing and NVIDIA DLSS, as MSI is celebrating the festive season with their December laptop promotion, offering up to 20% off on select MSI GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops. Don’t miss out on your chance to snag some unbeatable deals on MSI’s latest powerhouses (including the Stealth 16 AI Studio) to enjoy the best gaming, content creation and AI experiences. Thinking of picking up an MSI laptop this holiday season? You have chosen… wisely.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Si Jia
