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Yesterday, we had two massive, highly anticipated games that were released. Marvel Rivals, which is a free-to-play third-person shooter with Overwatch-like DNA, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. While the former did get confirmation from the developers about Steam Deck compatibility, Indiana Jones gave me the opposite impression from the minimum spec sheet they released. Asking for an RTX 2060 Super for the bare minimum is asking a lot and is way more than what the Steam Deck can handle.
Regardless, I wanted to test the game, so I purchased a copy and started getting to work. I can, without a doubt, humbly say that nobody should play this on the Steam Deck natively.
Before going into the performance, I will say that it seems like a really enjoyable game so far! I love seeing Indiana Jones in this light, and it seems like MachineGames has really hit it out of the park. That being said, locally downloaded performance on the Steam Deck paints a very different picture.
When I first booted the game, all of the textures were just gone. The main menu screen had what looked like a sketch of a human head, and when trying to go in-game, almost all trees were gone, and the textures were all over the place.
I ended up trying out different Proton layers, deleting Proton files, and rebooting the Deck, and nothing fixed this. However, I actually did end up fixing it when I booted into the Beta update channel on the device. I ended up using Proton Experimental's Bleeding Edge as well, and together, I was able to actually get a picture...and discovered a new problem.
Outside of these two problems, the game was able to run, just not well. I fluctuated between 18 and 28 FPS most of the time in the first scene, which let me relive one of Indiana Jones' most iconic scenes. Even on the lowest settings, it was consistently below 30 FPS. You could probably set this to 24 FPS and it be mostly playable, but with the green eyes and flashing shadows, it is not an enjoyable time.
Inside areas do run a bit better, and I was getting around 30 - 40 FPS when in the museum, but with a lot of the game taking place outside, this is more like a short reprieve from the normal performance.
A big reason the performance could be tanking is ray tracing. The game has forced ray tracing that you can't turn off, which is generally very taxing on the system. It would also explain why the 2060 Super is the recommended GPU for the bare minimum, but that still isn't great.
However, the saving grace is streaming. If you have GeForce NOW, you can stream Indiana Jones to your Deck, without any of the graphical glitches or needing to sacrifice visuals. This is the way I am playing it on my Steam Deck, and it's significantly more enjoyable. But I can't see any enjoyable way to experience the game locally downloaded.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle can be purchased on Steam for $69.99, but you can get it on Fanatical for $58.79 before it releases on December 8th. You can also get the Premium version for $83.99 and play the game right now.
The Fanatical links above are using an affiliate link, which gives us a little back from sales at no extra charge to you. All proceeds go back into SDHQ and its development.
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What’s even more flabbergasting to me is why they opted to use Vulkan for this game. It’s a good graphical API, but it also means I can’t use ReShade to inject post processing shaders to improve the look of the game. The low preset is playable if you play on 1152 x 720, which gives you 30 FPS across the board with occasional drops to upper 20s, maybe mid to upper 20s at worst. The hard baked RT was a stupid choice when they could have used SSR instead with RT being optional. The GI and RT in this game are overkill, in fact, everything is too bright and there’s something funny about the graphics still despite using FSR to improve clarity. You also need a launch command to fix the chunky pixels. I hope subsequent patches can further optimize this game because performance, even at 30 FPS, still feels inconsistent and even when I raise the graphics, to say medium, they still look off. There’s something uncanny about how everything looks, and the green glowing eyes kill the immersion.
Curious to know if you used Cryoutilities, set swap to 16GB and UMA to 4GB? And if you tried proton-GE? GE would be the best option for any newly released game. Infact I only use GE to game now.
We're forcing ray tracing because we couldn't be arsed taking the time to optimise lighting.
Stuff like this isn't to improve the game for customers, this is a cost cutting measure.
How did you purchase a game that's not out yet?
The game is released, but only for those who own the Premium Edition, it's been out for a couple of days now if you paid extra.