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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 been formed.
Epic Games has also improved the graphics of the game by updating Fortnite Chapter 4 to Unreal Engine 5.1. While the game was already running on Unreal Engine 5, the developers are now taking full advantage of its core features, especially Nanite and Lumen. Here’s 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, wooden board and wall decoration is modeled. The natural landscapes are also very detailed. Individual trees have around 300,000 polygons, every stone, flower and blade of grass is modeled.
Light
Lumen reflections provide high-quality ray tracing on glossy materials and water. Additionally, Lumen provides real-time global illumination at 60 FPS. You’ll see beautiful interiors with indirect lighting, as well as characters that react to ambient lighting. (For example, red carpets may reflect red light off your equipment.) Also, equipment that has emissive (that is, luminous) 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 molded detail will cast a shadow and the character self-shadowing is extremely accurate. This means that things like hats and other small character details will also cast shadows.
Temporal Super Resolution (TSR)
Temporal Super Resolution is an enhancement to Fortnite’s temporal anti-aliasing that delivers high-quality visuals at high frame rates.
Please note that NVIDIA DLSS is currently disabled as Epic ensures it works properly 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 the 120 FPS mode in settings.
