Fortnite Impresses With Visuals on Improved Engine

Developers from Epic Games have prepared a real next-gen graphics leap in their most profitable game - Fortnite.

With yesterday's update, moving players into the first season of the fourth chapter, the popular battle royale received a number of visual improvements and features related to the move to Unreal Engine 5.1.

New visual quality in Fortnite

The use of the latest version of Unreal Engine 5 has resulted in the use of such technologies as Lumen, allowing for realistic reflections in water and shiny materials, and Nanite, providing greater detail in objects.

Nanite

The technology provides "highly detailed architectural geometry," so that all buildings and natural environments are rendered in real time from millions of polygons.

According to the developers, a single tree is said to consist of about 300,000 polygons.

Lumen

As mentioned earlier, the Lumen technology is responsible for improved lighting. This applies not only to the sun rays reflected in water, but also in any suitable surface (even some elements of costumes).

Reflections on the water gained a lot from the change to the new enginePhoto: Epic Games

Virtual shadow mapping

This option provides exceptional shadow detail. It ensures that every shadow, even the tiniest one, cast by small objects (e.g., a hat) should be clearly visible.

In addition, Fortnite received super temporal resolution, which, the developers explain, is an improved version of temporal anti-aliasing. Thanks to this, graphics and smoothness of the image are to gain even more quality.

Photo: Epic Games

PC changes

The update, although in addition to PC it also covers PS5, XSX/XSS and cloud gaming, has brought the biggest changes to desktops..

The entire graphics settings section on PC have undergone a significant remodeling to accommodate new features (you can read more about it here). Promptly, you will need slightly better hardware to handle the new graphics options.

The minimum system settings to support Nanite recommend:

• For Nvidia cards: at least Maxwell series cards (from GeForce 750/750Ti upwards);
• For AMD cards: at least cards from the GCN generation.

As for the recommended graphics settings, the following have increased:

• Nvidia: GeForce RTX 2080 or later;
• AMD: Radeon RX 5700 or later.

Tuned Fortnite also requires DirectX 12.

It is worth mentioning that with the latest update of Fortnite ends support for older operating systems, such as Windows 7 and 8. From now on, Windows 10 or 11 will be required to play with official support.

• Fortnite - official website
• Fortnite: Battle Royale - game guide

Fortnite

September 26, 2017

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