The newest season of Fortnite is just around the corner, and, as per usual, the rumor mill has been churning out all sorts of guesses about upcoming changes to the game. Now, in a blog post, Epic Games confirmed that Fortnite will be seeing enhanced graphics options for players on higher-end rigs.
As players are now being abducted in Fortnite, the assumptions are leaning heavily towards an alien invasion to herald the coming of Season 7. In an effort to spruce up the game, Epic revealed its plan to make changes to both the current High and Epic graphic options—with greater system requirements for players opting for Epic graphics.
Since the changes are targeted at the highest option level, the current High setting will essentially be replaced by what is currently known as Epic, and the new Epic level will introduce "improved postprocessing features for bloom and lens flares, as well as improved shadow quality." This means that when Fornite Season 6 ends, both players on High and Epic settings will see an increase in recommended system requirements, but the change will not affect the lower graphics options.
Of course, these changes are mostly just bringing PC players up to speed with the next-gen console changes. As Fortnite Season 7 rolls out, it will bring in enhanced visual effects like explosion quality, that players on the PS5 and Xbox Series X are already used to. Alongside animation changes, Season 7 will also bring "improved Storm and cloud effects, as well as enhanced simulations for smoke and liquid." Fortunately, the upcoming changes will also have no bearing on the controversial Performance rendering mode in Fortnite, which gives some PC players a massive advantage by offering quick frame rates paired with reduced visual clutter.
Although the forthcoming graphic changes are exciting, the system requirement increase will be far from prohibitive for most already high-end players. The new recommended requirements for Epic quality will be for:
- Nvidia GTX 1080, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, or equivalent GPU
- 4 GB VRAM or higher
- Intel Core i7-8700, AMD Ryzen 7 3700x, or equivalent
- 16 GB RAM or higher
- NVMe Solid State Drive
- Windows 10 64-bit
While these requirements mean that would-be Epic quality players need a relatively powerful rig, it still keeps the requirements below battle royale peers like Call of Duty: Warzone, meaning that as gamers gear up for the Season 7 alien invasion, they won't have to stress too much about upgrading their computer unless they were already struggling to meet the requirements for the previous Epic graphic settings.
Fortnite is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Epic Games