Bloodbath for GPUs with less than 12 GB VRAM: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle hammers cards like RTX 4060/Ti
It has become increasingly clear over the past few years that 8 GB cards like the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 aren’t going to cut it for AAA games in the near future. We saw this with the launch of The Last of Us Part 1 on PC and we are now seeing this with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
While Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has been garnering positive attention from the media (check out our review) and the fans alike, the game presents another example of why AMD and Nvidia need to move away from 8 GB cards. According to Computer Base’s benchmarks, the game needs more than 8 GB of VRAM to run smoothly at FHD if you are planning to use medium or above graphics.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle performance
Starting with the game’s performance at FHD with “Hyper” settings and RT enabled, Computer Base reports that 8 GB cards like the RTX 4060 and the RTX 3060 Ti can’t even maintain an average 30 FPS with abysmal 1% lows of less than 20 FPS. The same is roughly true for the RX 7600 and the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB, as both GPUs only offer 30 FPS on average but the RTX 4060 Ti struggles with 1% lows of around 18 FPS while the RX 7600 manages a slightly higher 25 FPS.
The effect of limited VRAM is clearly shown by the RTX 3080 and the RX 6700 XT. While both GPUs fall in the same performance class on paper, the RX 6700 XT performs almost 2x better with 1% lows that are a more than 2x increase over the RTX 3080.
So, why is the RTX 3080, which has more rasterization and RT performance than the RX 6700 XT, faring much worse? The answer lies in the RX 6700 XT enjoying 2 GB more VRAM vs the RTX 3080’s 10 GB buffer. The same is true for the Arc A770 (16 GB) which is performing better than the RTX 4060 Ti (8 GB) despite being slower.
Finally, as games get more and more graphically advanced with higher fidelity textures and RT, things will continue to get worse for <12 GB VRAM cards. As such, we hope Nvidia and AMD’s RTX 50 and RDNA 4 offerings start from at least 12 GB and not the dreaded 8 GB that we’ve seen this generation.
Aside from desktops, if you want to see how Indiana Jones and the Great Circle runs on high-end laptops, please check out our YouTube video of the title running on the Rog Zephyrus Duo and its RTX 4090 Laptop, linked below.
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