Hold on to your potatoes because Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's system requirements demand ray tracing you can't disable and an RTX 4090 for highest settings

The system requirements for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle have just dropped, and in the words of ever-prescient Short Round: "Okey dokey, Dr Jones, hold on to your potatoes!"

The requirements follow the recent trend of requiring a metric heap-load of storage space, this time meaning 120 of your finest gigabytes—and do you see why we always recommend at least a 2 TB SSD for your builds? But storage isn't the only thing that'll make you want to clutch your various starches, because the road gets quite bumpy when you move up past the minimum requirements.

The recommended requirements list an RTX 3080 Ti or RX 7700 XT to hit a target 60 fps on high settings. Oof—looks like I'm out of the running using what the game's making now making me think might be an ageing RTX 3060 Ti.

In fact, instead of waffling on, let's just look at the requirements in full:

Part of the reason why these requirements are so high, I'm sure, is because, for the first time ever for a mainstream title, hardware ray tracing is required across the board. That's why the minimum specs start with the RTX 2060 Super and RX 6600 XT: graphics cards from previous generations don't have ray tracing cores. Sucks to be a GTX 1080 Ti owner, I guess?

This requirement will presumably mean some limited form of ray tracing across every setting segment, be it low or ultra-high. Which isn't to say that such a limited form of RT is all you can get, because the game boasts "Full Ray Tracing", ie, path tracing.

As Nvidia explains: "Full Ray Tracing is a demanding but highly accurate way to render light and its effect on a scene, used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that are indistinguishable from reality."

This is similar to what we find in Black Myth: Wukong, and with Indiana Jones this creates for some seriously beefy upper-end requirements. Bethesda separates its Full Ray Tracing requirements from its standard ones, and the minimum requirements for the former are a Core i7 10700K and RTX 4070.

And to run the game on Ultra settings with Full Ray Tracing? Yep, that's an RTX 4090 that Bethesda recommends. Oh, and an Intel Core i7 13900K, just for good measure.

I don't know what's harder to swallow, those path traced requirements or a side of monkey brains. At least the minimum requirements list only 16 GB RAM, I suppose, but that's about the only light touch in all these specifications.