A fortnight (hah!) after announcing Fortnite’s spit-shined new looks, Epic’s battle royale now supports RTX ray tracing and DLSS 2.0 - assuming you’ve got the cards for ’em.
I’ll be frank. When I think about games that’d benefit from expensive, real-time ray tracing, Fortnite isn’t high on the list. But while you can miss me with tiny reflections on helmets and gun scopes, it does look quite stunning when once-flat glass facades become building-sized mirrors. Ray traced shadows and ambient occlusion are more subtle, but should play nicely into murder island’s sweeping, accelerated day/night cycle. Still, many of these updates might be hard to appreciate in the heat of battle. To that end, Epic and Nvidia have bashed together a creative map to show off RTX features in the best possible light. You can pop in for a look by visiting Island Code 9189-0518-5408, or catch a deep dive over on Nvidia’s post detailing the update. Today’s update also adds DLSS 2.0 support to Fortnite, a piece of AI-powered upscaling wizardry for improving performance at higher resolutions. While Fortnite isn’t as demanding as, say, Death Stranding, tech expert Katharine reckoned “you’d be nuts” not to turn it on in KojiPro’s walk ’em up, and the same likely applies here. The update also brings in something called Nvidia Reflex, which supposedly improves latency times by cutting through the GPU render queue. As per the Fortnite blog, you’ll need at least an RTX 2060 to switch on new features (though they recommend an RTX 2080 or higher). Mind, if you’re picking up a spankin’ new RTX 3080 today, you’ll be more than set to go.
