With the launch of Fortnite's fourth Chapter, Epic Games reveals that the game is using some of the latest features introduced in Unreal Engine 5.1. This free-to-play title has added rounds of seasonal content ever since its launch, separated by both Chapters and Seasons. Fortnite Chapter 4 recently launched, complete with a new trailer showing off some of the game's upcoming collaborations with properties such as My Hero Academia, Doom, and The Witcher.Unreal Engine 5 is the latest version of Epic Games' proprietary creation tool, which became available for game developers to use earlier this year. This engine is touted to be a big step up in visual fidelity, especially for big game worlds. Fortnite itself switched over to Unreal Engine 5 last year, which was introduced during the third chapter. Shortly after the Chapter 4 trailer dropped, Epic Games posted on its blog about how Fortnite benefited from the technical features introduced in Unreal Engine 5.1.The first of these is in the visual upgrades from Unreal Engine 5, in the forms of Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution. These all help provide both high-quality visuals without compromising the framerate. For example, Lumen reflections are high-quality ray-traced reflections that can be spotted on surfaces like water, or interior spaces having bounce lighting. Some of these qualities can be seen in some of the images included in the blog post, which showcase various Fortnite maps using these features.
With these new Unreal Engine 5 features in Fortnite, the video settings will also be changed for PC users, many of them related to the performance and specific settings related to the aforementioned specific features. The blog post notes that DLSS in the PC version of Fortnite will be disabled as Epic Games ensures it works alongside Unreal Engine 5.1's features. For players on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series users, for these visual upgrades to be seen, the 120 FPS mode setting must be turned off.
With these visual upgrades, however, Epic Games notes that there will be changes coming to the legacy support on PC. Specifically, Fortnite won't be supported on Windows 7 or 8 in the future, with Windows 10 being required to play Chapter 4 Season 2 from hereon. According to the blog post, since Fortnite is evolving with its technology, there are bound to be security risks as well as modern features that aren't being implemented when working on these legacy systems.
Fortnite is available now on mobile devices, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
