Bethesda and MachineGames have published the PC requirements for Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, and there’s some strange things going on in it.
As reported by The Verge, the requirements for the highest tier, Ultra with full ray tracing enabled, requires either an Intel Core i7-13900K, or an AMD Ryzen 7 7900X. The problem is, those CPUs don’t actually exist. Verge has asked for comment from Bethesda, but it certainly sounds like these are CPUs that Intel and AMD were planning to announce and release, but they just haven’t come to the market yet.
For Intel’s case, it is somewhat understandable, given the hellish year the company has been going through. But there’s certainly some mystery as to why AMD may not have released such a CPU yet. If we were to wager a guess, both companies are simply going through the production difficulties that we know the chips industry has been going through in the past few years. We don’t know where the exact holdup is, but there’s something that stopped them both from getting these really high end chips out. You can see these system requirements below.
Maybe they’re still catching up to meeting demand for the other chips this year, maybe there’s an unusually high failrate in making them, or maybe there just aren’t enough foundries and factories to go around. And all of this is assuming that these chips are real. We will concede it’s possible that MachineGames made some guesses that Intel and AMD were making chips like this without being sure. But we’ll see what they have to say.
The low end of system requirements indicates that Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is definitely a modern day title. Even at its lowest settings, it will require that you have an SSD, and that your GPU supports hardware ray tracing. So that processor has to be either an Intel Core i7-10700K @ 3.8 GHz or an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 @ 3.6 GHz.
For the GPU, you will need to have a minimum of either an RTX 2060 Super 8 GB, an RX 6600 8 GB, or an Intel Arc A580. Even though it isn’t in the A580’s name, all these GPUs have a minimum of 8 GB GDDR6 memory. And all of this will only run the game on Low settings, with only partial ray tracing. Thankfully, that minimum ensures the game runs at 1080p 60FPS.
So if it isn’t clear yet, no, your Steam Deck, Legion Go, and ROG Ally all are not powerful enough to run Indiana Jones And The Great Circle. We assume gamers who try it will find that it’s a terrible experience that won’t even be worth the effort of testing it. It will be interesting to see how this game will then be performing on the Xbox Series S, which is clearly at a lower performance level on these specs.
Speaking of Xbox, Xbox Series owners get to choose to download the base game of roughly 87 GB at minimum, and an optional 45 GB high resolution texture package. That 45 GB package automatically downloads on the Xbox Series X. We can only assume MachineGames did some special programming just for the Xbox Series S to run this game, in the same way games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt went through some special programming to run on the Nintendo Switch. But this mystery won’t be unsolved for long, as Indiana Jones And The Great Circle releases on December 6.
