Fortnite launches Chapter 4 Season 1 today. In amongst all the excitement over new content, there are actually some pretty cool new visuals to check out. Epic Games has shared a new developer blog detailing how the newest chapter in Fortnite‘s story is bringing an evolution in its graphics too.
The new adventure for the world’s biggest battle royale game will see Epic Games implementing a wealth of features from Unreal Engine 5. This means that thanks to the new technologies added from Unreal Engine 5.1, the island is about to look more impressive and highly detailed than ever before. This is especially true on current-generation hardware such as Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. These new technologies have been revealed as revolutionary current-gen-specific Unreal Engine 5 features such as Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution. These will now all be available in Fortnite on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and when playing via cloud gaming.
Getting down to detail, Epic Games has provided a breakdown of exactly what each new feature means for players. In a nutshell, Nanite will render buildings as being even more realistic and complex than ever before, as it provides highly-detailed architectural geometry in-game. Lumen provides high-quality ray-traced reflections on glossy materials and water and creates particularly gorgeous-sounding real-time global illumination at 60 FPS. Glowing outfit skins will also look more reflective and luminous, with light bouncing from them onto nearby objects and surfaces.
The game will also now have much more detailed shadowing effects thanks to its use of virtual shadow maps. Realistic-feeling shadows will now be cast by a wider variety of objects. Additionally, Fortnite‘s previous Temporal Anti-Aliasing setting is getting an upgrade. Players will now be able to enable Temporal Super Resolution, which “allows for high-quality visuals at a high framerate.”
All these changes for current-generation consoles also have an impact on those playing on PC. Fortnite‘s video settings have changed for PC players, so it’s advised to check out the latest blog post to see which settings you’ll need to apply to ensure the game runs at its best on your hardware.
It’s worth remembering that this new technology will only work on current-generation consoles and PC, so if you’re on Xbox One or PS4 you won’t get the full benefit of these new settings. Either way, it’s clear that the team at Epic Games have been putting in some major legwork to give Fortnite a graphical makeover, and it looks pretty impressive from what we’ve seen so far.
Fortnite is available free-to-play now on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC via the Epic Games Store.
