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Epic Games has launched Fortnite Chapter 4, kicking off a new season of the popular free-to-play game. It’s not just a new season, as a whole new island has formed.
Epic Games has also improved the game’s graphics by updating Fortnite Chapter 4 to Unreal Engine 5.1. While the game was already running on Unreal Engine 5, developers are now taking full advantage of its core features, most notably Nanite and Lumen. Here is an overview provided by Epic:
Nanites
Nanite provides highly detailed architectural geometry. In particular, buildings are created from millions of polygons in real time, every brick, stone, wood plank and wall decoration is modeled. Natural landscapes are also highly detailed. Individual trees have regarding 300,000 polygons, every stone, flower and blade of grass is modeled.
Lumen
Lumen reflections provide high quality ray tracing on shiny materials and water. In addition, Lumen provides real-time global illumination at 60 FPS. You will see beautiful interiors with indirect lighting, as well as characters reacting to the lighting of the environment. (For example, red carpets can reflect red light onto your gear.) In addition, gear that has emissive (i.e. glowing) properties will scatter light onto nearby objects and surfaces.
Virtual shadow maps
Virtual shadow maps allow you to create highly detailed shadows. Every brick, leaf, and modeled detail will cast a shadow, and character self-shadowing is extremely accurate. This means that things like hats and other small details on characters will also cast shadows.
Temporal Super Resolution (TSR)
Temporal Super Resolution is an enhancement to Fortnite’s Temporal Anti-Aliasing that delivers high quality images at high frame rates.
Please note that NVIDIA DLSS is currently disabled as Epic ensures it works correctly in this new build. On next-gen consoles (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X), Fortnite Chapter 4 players can still enjoy Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution, as long as they turn off 120 FPS mode in settings.
