Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1 and future updates will now be powered by the latest Unreal Engine 5.1 – Unreal Engine 5.1 is the latest game creation platform created by Epic Games. Three weeks after its official release, Epic Games has now also announced that Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1 and its future updates will now be powered by this. This upgradation will improve the game’s graphics by a huge amount.
Unreal Engine 5.1 brings support for various technologies like Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution. The only catch is that these features are built for the latest generation of gaming equipment such as PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and cloud gaming. Hence, older hardware may no longer support the game.
Let us take a look at these features described by the Fortnite devs.
Unreal Engine 5.1 in fortnite: NANITE, LUMEN, VIRTUAL SHADOW MAPS, AND TEMPORAL SUPER RESOLUTION
NANITE
Nanite provides highly-detailed architectural geometry. Specifically, buildings are rendered from millions of polygons in real-time, and each brick, stone, wood plank, and wall trim is modeled. Natural landscapes are highly-detailed too. Individual trees have around 300,000 polygons, and each stone, flower, and blade of grass is modeled.
LUMEN
Lumen reflections provide high-quality ray-traced reflections on glossy materials and water. Also, Lumen provides real-time global illumination at 60 FPS. It makes interior spaces more beautiful with bounce lighting, plus characters reacting to the lighting of their surroundings. Also, Outfits that have emissive qualities (glowing) will scatter light on nearby objects and surfaces.
VIRTUAL SHADOW MAPS
Virtual Shadow Maps allow for highly detailed shadowing. Each brick, leaf, and modeled detail will cast a shadow, and character self-shadowing is extremely accurate. It means that things like hats and other small details on characters will also cast shadows.
TEMPORAL SUPER RESOLUTION (TSR)
Temporal Super Resolution is an upgrade over Temporal Anti-Aliasing in Fortnite and allows for high-quality visuals at a high framerate.
new video settings for Fortnite pc
Due to the implementation of these Unreal Engine 5 features, the following video settings have changed on Fortnite PC.
DISPLAY SECTION
- “Rendering Mode” Setting
- Moved from the “Advanced Graphics” section to the “Display” section.
- DirectX 12 is now the default rendering mode on PCs with certain higher-end GPUs.
- The “Performance” rendering mode is no longer in beta and is now called “Performance – Lower Graphical Fidelity.”
- “VSync” Setting
- Moved from the “Advanced Graphics” section to the “Display” section.
GRAPHICS SECTION
- “Temporal Super Resolution” Setting
- Recommended (default): Selects the 3D resolution based on what works best for your display resolution.
- Performance: Prioritizes frame rate over final image quality by rendering at a lower resolution.
- Balanced: Balances the image quality versus performance.
- Quality: Prioritizes final image quality over performance by rendering at a higher resolution.
- Native: Allows you to render frames at the native display resolution at the expense of performance.
- Custom: Allows you to customize the 3D resolution on a slider.
- “Nanite Virtualized Geometry” Setting
- Only available if the rendering mode is set to DirectX 12.
- If “Nanite Virtualized Geometry” is turned on, Nanite will be enabled.
- When Nanite is enabled, the “Shadows” setting is renamed to “Virtual Shadows.”
- Defaults to on when the “Quality Presets” setting is set to High or Epic.
- This setting cannot be changed mid-match.
- “Global Illumination” Setting
- Enables Lumen Global Illumination when set to High or Epic.
- When Nanite is disabled, this setting has two options: Only Off, and Ambient Occlusion. (Ambient Occlusion = Lower quality ambient lighting with darkened corners.)
- When Nanite is enabled, two more options are added: Lumen High, and Lumen Epic.
- This setting cannot be changed mid-match.
- “Reflections” Setting
- Enables Lumen Reflections when set to High or Epic.
- When Nanite is disabled, this setting has two options: Only Off, and Screen Space. (Screen Space = Calculates reflections based only on what is currently shown on the screen.)
- When Nanite is enabled, two more options are added: Lumen High, and Lumen Epic.
- “Hardware Ray Tracing” Setting
- “Hardware Ray Tracing” makes it so that Lumen Global Illumination and Lumen Reflections use hardware-accelerated ray tracing. (The “Hardware Ray Tracing” setting in the “Graphics Quality” section has replaced the “Ray Tracing” section.)
- It’s defaulted to off.
- To turn “Hardware Ray Tracing” on:
- Nanite must be enabled. (In other words, “Nanite Virtualized Geometry” is turned on.)
- Either “Global Illumination” or “Reflections” must be set to Lumen High or Lumen Epic.
- Turning this setting on or off requires a game restart to take effect.
- “Auto-Set Quality”
- Selecting “Auto-Set Quality” sets most Graphics Quality settings to either the Low, Medium, High, or Epic options, and also sets options for the “Global Illumination” and “Reflections” settings.
- Sets the “Anti-Aliasing & Super Resolution” setting to either the TSR Low, TSR Medium, TSR High, or TSR Epic options, and the “Temporal Super Resolution” setting to Recommended.
These are the latest features that will now be available within Fortnite Battle Royale thanks to Unreal Engine 5.1. Players need to upgrade their playing hardware to make use of these features as well as enjoy smooth, high-quality gameplay. Stay tuned to get more of such latest updates from Fortnite and other popular games.
Read More– Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1 arrives with a new map, weapons, Battle Pass, and a lot more
