You need an RTX 4090 to play Indiana Jones at max settings; AMD isn’t listed

By Monica J. White Published December 5, 2024

The upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is releasing on December 9, and Bethesda has just shared the hardware requirements for the game. What are we dealing with? Well, to say that you’ll need one of the best graphics cards would be an understatement. If you want to play the new Indiana Jones at maximum settings, you’ll need an RTX 4090 — AMD cards aren’t even listed as an option.

The latest Indiana Jones game is a real step up in terms of hardware requirements across the board. For starters, you need to have a hardware ray tracing GPU as a minimum requirement, and that will lock out all the people who are still running an older AMD card or an Nvidia GTX GPU, such as the GTX 1060 or GTX 1660 Super. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Running the game at a bare minimum of 1080p on low settings already calls for some pretty steep specs. You’ll need an Intel Core i7-10700K or an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 at the very least, and while those are a few years old by now, there are plenty of people still running older CPUs. Then, Bethesda recommends an RTX 2060 Super 8GB or an AMD Radeon RX 6600 8GB, as well as Intel’s Arc A580, as GPU options. Intel doesn’t appear again on the list — it’s only an option for the low graphic preset at 1080p. The minimum RAM requirement is 16GB, which is a common thing in AAA games these days.

To run the game at 4K on high settings — without ray tracing, mind you — you’ll need a Core i9-13900K or a Ryzen 9 7900X, 32GB RAM, and at least an RTX 4080 or an RX 7900 XT. But if you want to experience the game at maximum settings with ray tracing enabled, you’ll need one beast of a gaming PC.

As I mentioned, Bethesda doesn’t even list AMD cards in the three ray tracing presets, as it seems to rely on Nvidia’s DLSS 3 to deliver a solid gaming experience. Playing at low settings and at 1080p with full ray tracing (presumably including path tracing) already calls for an RTX 4070, but if you go up to 1440p at high settings, you’ll need an RTX 4080.

Want to play at max settings with full ray tracing at 4K? Your only option is the top GPU currently available, meaning the RTX 4090. Even then, Bethesda notes that you should be using DLSS 3 with the Performance preset, meaning boosting frame rates instead of quality. The target frames per second (fps) is just 60 fps.

It’s hard to deny that these are difficult requirements for many gamers, especially when just buying an Xbox is also an option. Fortunately, with next-gen graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD right around the corner, some of these targets might be easier to meet soon enough. For now, though, most of us will be playing at lower settings and leaving ray tracing off.