Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Disputes Nvidia.
"Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looks stunning, but Nvidia's limited VRAM capacity faces challenges in the game."
Recently, it has come to light that some of Nvidia's claims about its graphics cards may not be entirely accurate, particularly regarding its game "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle." Although the title is sponsored by Nvidia and employs full ray tracing expected to be available from December 9, various tests have revealed that several of the company's top graphics cards struggle to reach playable frame rates, mainly due to the amount of available VRAM.
An analysis of multiple models of graphics cards, conducted at various resolutions and with the highest graphical settings, has made one point clear: those graphics cards with less than 12GB of VRAM fail to maintain even 30 frames per second in the game. This has led to surprising comparisons, such as the Intel Arc A770, designed for 1080p, outperforming the RTX 3080, which is considered a champion in 4K. This difference is explained by the fact that the A770 has 16GB of VRAM, while the RTX 3080 only has 10GB.
Nvidia has faced criticism recently because many of its lower-performing models only come with 8GB of VRAM. The company justified this decision, particularly with the RTX 4060 Ti, arguing that this amount of VRAM is sufficient for modern games when combined with a faster memory interface. However, the results from "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" suggest otherwise, especially at 1080p resolutions, where high-capacity VRAM options are quite limited.
The test results show that even the previous generation RX 6700 XT can achieve 60 fps at 1080p, while the RTX 4060, RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 3060 Ti barely reach 30 fps. This is concerning because the game demands dedicated ray tracing hardware, and while this mode cannot be disabled, Nvidia generally highlights the superiority of its cards in handling ray tracing compared to AMD. Despite this, the higher VRAM volume of the RX 6700 XT allows it to perform better in this title.
Despite the capabilities of technologies like DLSS 3, which includes Super Resolution and Frame Generation, these resources do not solve the problem if there is a VRAM limitation at the selected resolution. This is not an isolated issue, as over the past two years, other games like Resident Evil 4, The Last of Us Part One, and Halo Infinite have also shown difficulties on 8GB graphics cards, but the situation with "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" is particularly critical. Nvidia is expected to consider increasing VRAM capacity in the upcoming RTX 50 GPU series.
