While I completely understand frustration if a relatively recent PC with a fairly high-end graphics card won't run a new game without turning down the graphics settings, I'm glad to see games start to require ray tracing. That's the current frontier in gaming that's needed for the next wave of graphical fidelity. The problem, unlike framerate, resolution, and many other settings, which can just be turned down or off on lesser hardware, is that until developers can count on all PC's that will run their game supporting sufficient ray tracing, they need to bake in manual lighting solutions, which takes a HUGE amount of effort and work to do manually. Ray tracing and path tracing do a better job and do this automatically. But if any systems can't support ray tracing, they need to spend (waste) all that time doing it manually.
So we really need to all be rooting for the end of ANY gaming PCs that can't support sufficient ray tracing so that basic ray tracing serves as the baseline system for any game that requires lighting effects. This will finally free developers of this albatross of manual lighting solutions.
Sadly, ray tracing tech is still so nascent that really something like a 4070 is probably about the lowest level graphics card that can handle it well (I only have a 3060, so I'm not there myself, partly because I mainly game on Xbox these days). AMD doesn't make any cards that do ray tracing well (which is also a problem for Xbox, hopefully they'll solve this in time for the next gen model). Not too sure about Intel's ARC, but I think it's closer to AMD than Nvidia. So games like this new Indiana Jones game really help push the envelope, forcing AMD and Intel to focus more on ray tracing over just plain pixel moving and encouraging Nvidia to push the good tech down to their cheaper higher volume cards.
As a historical precedent, back in the '90s, Wing Commander led to a whole new generation of gaming PCs because it was so demanding that most existing PCs couldn't play it. But it was also the best action game of its time, so people were willing to upgrade to play it. The next generation of games all took advantage of that new hardware and were much better than they could have been if it weren't for Wing Commander motivating everyone to upgrade. I hope this new Indy game is good enough to have that same effect finally getting everyone to adopt ray-tracing tech.
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