RTX Hair Update in Indiana Jones The Great Circle

Nvidia to add RTX Hair technology to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, promising more realistic hair with real time path tracing.

RTX Hair Brings Realistic Hair to Indiana Jones The Great Circle

Nvidia has announced that RTX Hair will be added to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on September 4. The feature uses Disjoint Orthogonal Triangle Strips, or DOTS, to improve lighting and shadows on hair while using less memory than rendering hair as triangles for every frame. The update will be available to RTX 50 series GPUs and is described by Nvidia as a significant step toward rendering high quality digital humans in real time.

Hair and fur have long posed challenges for real time rendering. DOTS relies on linear swept spheres to create hair geometry that looks naturally round, helping reduce issues with self intersection when casting shadow and reflection rays. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launched last year on PC and Xbox Series X|S, with a PS5 release in April 2025, and the September update will coincide with the expansion The Order of Giants, which follows Dr. Jones on a quest to uncover the Nephilim Order.

This move highlights a broader push toward convincing digital humans in games. Real time path tracing and improved hair rendering can elevate immersion, but they also raise questions about hardware requirements and access. Requiring RTX 50 series GPUs could widen the gap between players with newer machines and those on older rigs. For developers, the tech signals new possibilities for character realism without a dramatic rise in polygon counts, but it may push studios to optimize aggressively to keep frame rates steady on multiple platforms.

Highlights

The line between cinema quality and interactive games continues to blur as hardware and software advance together.