Epic Games has announced Fortnite Chapter 4, the start of a new season for its popular free-to-play battle royale game. An all-new island has been created, featuring key locations such as The Citadel, Anvil Square, Brutal Bastion, and Frenzy Fields.
Added to the gameplay is the dirt bike Trail Slasher, the ability to bounce obstacles by sprinting towards them, reality augments given randomly at regular intervals and, of course, new weapons and healing items. As you can see from the trailer, there will also be popular new characters like the Doom Slayer and the Witcher’s Geralt of Rivia.
Epic Games has also improved the game’s graphics by updating Fortnite Chapter 4 to Unreal Engine 5.1. The game was already running on Unreal Engine 5, but they decided to take full advantage of its key features, mainly Nanite and Lumen.
Nanite
Nanite provides high-definition architectural geometry. Specifically, the building is rendered in real-time with millions of polygons, modelling each brick, stone, wood plank, and wall decoration.
The natural scenery is also highly detailed. About 300,000 polygons were used for each tree, modelling each stone, flower and blade of grass.
Lumen
Reflections in Lumen provide high-quality ray-traced reflections on glossy materials and water surfaces.
The Lumen can also run real-time global illumination at 60 FPS. Reflective lighting makes the building space beautiful, and the surrounding lighting affects the character. In addition, radiant (shiny) textured costumes diffuse light onto nearby objects and surroundings.
Virtual Shadow Map
Virtual shadow maps allow for highly detailed shadows. Each brick, leaf, and modelled detail now casts a shadow, and the character’s shadow is extremely accurate. This means that the character’s hat and other details will also cast shadows.
Temporal Super Resolution (TSR)
In Fortnite, Temporal Super Resolution is an upgraded version of Temporal Antialiasing that delivers high-quality visuals at high framerates.
Of these tech improvements, only Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) has been added to Fortnite Save the World and creator-made islands. To enable hardware raytracing for Lumen GI and Reflections on PC, GI and Reflections must be set to Lumen High or Lumen Epic, and Nanite must also be enabled. Please note that NVIDIA DLSS is currently disabled to ensure Epic works properly with this new build.
On the latest consoles (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X), Fortnite Chapter 4 players can get Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution (TSR).
