Does PS5 Pro crack the whip for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle?

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is dropping onto PlayStation 5 this week, meaning that a whole tranche of new gamers are able to experience one of the best games of last year. And with the PlayStation 5 Pro being officially the very best and most powerful games console out there, we had to put this game through its paces on Sony’s platforms.

Even with Bethesda’s pre-2023 history as a major third party publisher, it’s still a strange feeling for what is now a Microsoft-owned company to be releasing its games on Xbox’s biggest rival platform. Even more strange feeling is that these ports to PS5 Pro are going to outshine Xbox Series X.

The question for Indiana Jones and any of these other game, though, is how much better is it going to be? How much more fully featured is this game on PS5 Pro?

Well… actually it’s not all that different. if you’re looking for the very best graphics and the most expansive set of ray tracing features to switch on, then you’re still going to need a high-end PC and a very expensive GPU in particular.

MachineGames created an exceptional technical showcase with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Using a heavily customised branch of the idTech engine, this game targeted 60fps on Xbox Series X, while still pushing for a typical 1800p (albeit with dynamic resolution scaling) and incorporating ray traced global illumination throughout. This uses ray tracing to bounce light through environments and realistically transfer colour and shade throughout. It absolutely pulled it off, and looks simply superb a lot of the time, with more naturalistic interior lighting in particular.

However, in order to get that performance, MachineGames made a number of cuts, taking some effects down to below what even Low is on PC, and making compromises for the game in general. Without any graphics options for performance modes or resolution modes, even an equivalently specced PC could get more visual fidelity at a lower resolution than console, regardless of whether you enable more ray traced features or not.

With this PlayStation port, it seems that base PS5 has pretty much identical visual targets to the Xbox Series X, including resolution windows and that pretty locked 60fps. PS5 Pro, however, pushes that up to a full 4K, a native 2160p target, still with 60fps. That might not sound like the biggest jump in resolution, but achieving a native 4K does add roughly half the pixels again, or more, depending on dynamic scaling on the lower consoles.

Compared to the original launch last December, Machine Games has been able to turn up the wick for the quality of the global illumination on consoles – the latest update for the game last week also brought RTGI improvements to aid ambient occlusion and contact shadows. If there’s any further push for PS5 Pro, then the different is marginal at best.

And… well that’s about it. The PS5 Pro is a little bit better than Xbox Series X and PS5, but for most people, you’re going to get an equivalent experience, just at lower resolution.

In other words PS5 Pro still has the most noticeable limitations of the game on console. In particular, the rasterised sun shadows are noticeably blocky even at their highest quality when close to the player camera, and there’s a very sharp cascade stepping as you walk through environments where long shadows have been cast, which is in contrast to the much smoother fade that you can get on PC without path traced sun shadowing.

And enabling sun shadows does have a huge impact to the look of the game on PC, giving much more softness as you get further away from window frames and other obstructions.

That does, however, come at a very steep cost. Enabling just this one additional ray tracing feature on our PC tanked the dynamic resolution to try and keep up. I’ve got a Radeon 6800 currently, which is far short of the minimum recommended GPU for turning on path tracing, the GeForce RTX 4070. Even then, that is only expected to hit 1080p with 60fps.

So perhaps this is beyond what the PS5 Pro can comfortably manage without making further compromises, but it’s still a shame that MachineGames weren’t able to extract more from the PS5 Pro.

It is also worth noting that, even with a handful of significant updates to the game since launch, there are still a handful of relatively minor bugs. Things like tutorial pop ups that don’t quite keep up with what you’re doing, showing irrelevant information, and some visual artifacting at distance, such as with flickering window panes or some odd black boxes in the sky. They’re few and far between, and hopefully noted for further updates to this game.

All in all, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is still a damn fine game, and this relative closeness just means that owners of the base PS5 are missing out on very little compared to the PS5 Pro.