Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s annoying ‘pop-in’ problem can be fixed with a single config command

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Released for all on December 9th (after an early access period starting on the 6th), Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has been one of the biggest game releases of the year. It delivers on its promise of stunning cinematic gameplay and “a thrilling story full of exploration, immersive action, and intriguing puzzles.”
It’s safe to say though that one of its drawbacks is performance. That’s not to say that it’s buggy like Stalker 2 – it isn’t. However, the system requirements are demanding, with GPU hardware ray tracing a minimum requirement. When putting together the best settings for the game, even our 7800X3D and RTX 3090 combo struggled at 4K.
One thing that the usual settings tweaks fail to account for is a common issue players have been experiencing: shadow and LOD (level of detail) pop-in. This can be described as when you can visibly see shadows or models appearing or altering in front of you. This kind of thing should be happening off-camera; it can be pretty jarring and ruins the immersion for some players.
Fix Indiana Jones shadow and LOD pop-in with a single command
As highlighted by Nihio on Nexus Mods, “awful shadow/LOD pop-in” can be fixed with one simple command. This relates to the LOD scale, presumedly adjusting the range of when higher quality shadows and models appear. Here’s how to edit the config file:
Step
Locate the config file
The first thing to do is locate the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle config file. You should find this via the following filepath:
C:\Users\[your PC user name]\Saved Games\MachineGames\TheGreatCircle\base
Within there, you’ll find TheGreatCircleConfig.cfg
Step
Add r_lodscale command
Open up the config file in your text editor of choice. Notepad works perfectly fine.
Then, at the very bottom of the file, you can add the r_lodscale command.
It should look like this: r_lodscale “5” (or with your desired value).
It’s worth mentioning that r_lodscale 5 will be more demanding on your system as models and shadows will be rendering at maximum quality much more often. As such, it’s worth experimenting with something more conservative such as r_lodscale 3. The default value is r_lodscale 1; one thread on Reddit even suggests as high as 10.
The irritating graphics issue has been pointed out by both reviewers and players. One such user on the Steam Community Forums claims they have the settings cranked up to Supreme (the maximum preset) with around 100 FPS. So, no problems there. But, annoyingly, the pop-in is still very noticeable, as demonstrated by the video below.