For those of you who have already experienced Fortnite Battle Royale, you know just how crazy it can be. A huge, open world map with the zone constantly encroaching, damaging players, all while hectic, zany battles take place across every corner of it. It’s a technical marvel to be executed so well on consoles, even on mobile devices. That performance is carefully monitored and adjusted through patches from Epic Games, but on PC, the restrictions are lifted. If you’re making the transition to PC Fortnite or maybe aren’t getting the performance to enjoy the experience, here’s some information that might help you.
Recent Changes in Fortnite
If you’ve been playing Fortnite since the beginning, you’ll have noticed the game’s performance has been adjusted a few times. Recently, the game was visually optimized to run at a higher frame rate on consoles, going from 30 fps to roughly -or as close to- 60 fps as possible. Initially, this was introduced as uncapped frames, but the option for choosing 30 fps and uncapped was removed in favor of always being uncapped.
This change brought about changes to the PC version as well. While frame caps were always possible on PC, this brought about some adjustments to how the PC version performed. For instance, the addition of Tilted Towers has caused considerable dips to even the most beastly of gaming rigs and pop-in of small objects as well as draw distance were terribly optimized. Now the game is in a better place, but these elements are still noticeable at times.
Figuring Out Your Ideal Frame Rate
If you’ve viewed any of the popular Fortnite streamers on Twitch, you’ll sometimes see their frame rate above 300 fps. This is due to having uncapped frames, as the majority of them will have a monitor around 144-240 hz. To get the most benefit from the game, you’ll want to play at a frame rate befitting your monitor. For example, it doesn’t make much sense to run the game above 60 fps if you only have a 60hz monitor. It’s better to remove strain from your GPU and cap the frames.
Which Settings You Should Target
Fortnite is a very forgiving PC game graphically. You’ll be able to hit a target of 60 fps on just about any graphics card released in the last few years. For instance, on a 960m you can run the game at 1080p at roughly 100 fps. On a 1060 Ti, our testing was hitting 200 fps on the right settings.
For Battle Royale in particular, you’ll want to reduce non-essential elements such as shadows, post-processing, and motion blur. You can also further reduce View Distance and Textures if you’re still having issues.
On the above settings, the graphics never dipped below the frame limit of 60 fps even on a laptop running a 960m GPU.
Save the World vs Battle Royale
When it comes to Save the World, Fortnite’s PvE portion, frame rate doesn’t give you a competitive advantage. You may be able to up your graphics settings for a better visual experience. Play around with the settings yourself to find the best look for your machine.
Final Thoughts
If you play Fortnite on console you’ll notice how different the game looks on the pro streamers PC’s than on your PS4 or Xbox. It looks...worse! This is by choice to make the game run as efficiently as possible, as well as being able to spot enemies without distractions. The game actually looks amazingly beautiful when running on Epic settings on a high end graphics card.
What platform do you play Fortnite on? Have you been able to get a stable frame rate throughout the recent patches? Let us know in the comments!
Author: Hercule SSJ
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