Epic Games has updated Fortnite with Unreal Engine 5.1 for its Battle Royale Chapter 4 and it now supports new features on PC and consoles. One of the new features includes an upgraded anti-aliasing option called Temporal Super Resolution for improved visuals at high frame rates. Next is Lumen which provides hardware ray traced reflections and global illumination. Nanite assists real-time rendering of highly detailed geometry. Lastly, Virtual Shadow Maps allow for accurately detailed shadows.
Unreal Engine 5.1 Fornite Screenshots
Feature Descriptions
“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. You’ll see beautiful interior spaces with bounce lighting, plus characters reacting to the lighting of their surroundings. (For example, red rugs may bounce red light onto your Outfit.) Also, Outfits that have emissive (a.k.a. glowing) qualities 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. 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 upgrade over Temporal Anti-Aliasing in Fortnite, and allows for high-quality visuals at a high framerate.“
Epic Games says that console players need to turn off the “120 FPS Mode” in order to use the new features. PC users with at least an NVIDIA Maxwell, or AMD GCN, generation GPU can utilize the new features long as they have the latest OS, DX12, and updated drivers. A GeForce RTX 2080 or Radeon TX 5700, or newer is recommended. The developers are currently testing DLSS so that option is presently disabled until it has been confirmed to work with Unreal Engine 5.1