Fortnite has made its next big step forward with the arrival of Chapter 4, and while that does, of course, bring plenty of new content with it, it also brings visual and technical makeover for the battle royale shooter. Epic Games has provided details on exactly how that’s done, with Fortnite having shifted to Unreal Engine 5.1.
That, in turn, has gone hand-in-hand with the implementation of a number of improvements and technologies. With Nanite’s implementation, Epic Games talks about the dense and highly-detailed architectural geometry found in the game. “Buildings are rendered from millions of polygons in real time, and each brick, stone, wood plank, and wall trim is modeled,” Epic writes. “Natural landscapes are highly-detailed too. Individual trees have around 300,000 polygons, and each stone, flower, and blade of grass is modeled.”
Then you have Lumen, which enables real-time global illumination at 60 FPS, with Lumen reflections also providing high-quality ray traced reflections on glossy materials and water. “You’ll see beautiful interior spaces with bounce lighting, plus characters reacting to the lighting of their surroundings,” the company explains. “Also, Outfits that have emissive qualities will scatter light on nearby objects and surfaces.”
Also implemented are virtual shadow maps for highly detailed shadowing. “Each brick, leaf, and modeled detail will cast a shadow, and character self-shadowing is extremely accurate,” Epic writes. “This means that things like hats and other small details on characters will also cast shadows.” Finally, Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) also represents an upgrade over the previously implemented Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA), allowing for better visuals and a higher frame rate.
Fortnite players on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and cloud gaming will be able to see the changes in action. Check out the screenshots below for a glimpse of what it looks like- it’s rather impressive.