With the Epic v. Apple court case going on this week, it's easy to miss the news about Fortnite itself. While not as interesting as people shouting "Free Fortnite" during legal proceedings, the release of Fortnite's Performance Mode, which increases frame rates for players using the lowest spec PCs, is still a pretty big deal.

According to the Fortnite team, Performance Mode is "an experimental new mode that provides significant performance gains by reducing memory usage and offloading the CPU and GPU in exchange for visual quality." As long as your system meets the minimum performance requirements, you should see a performance boost.

Performance mode can be turned on by switching the rendering mode to "Performance (Alpha)" under "Advanced Graphics" in Fortnite's video settings. From the screenshots below, it appears that the visual quality drops dramatically to smooth out the frame rate.

Epic cites several examples where Performance mode increased frame rates by over 100% on both Intel and AMD systems running integrated graphics set to 720p: AMD Radeon HD 8610G integrated graphics ( 2013) improved from virtually unplayable to somewhat competitive, going from 18fps to 45fps on a system running integrated graphics.

In addition to the performance mode, users can now opt out of downloading high-resolution textures (16.44 GB), reducing the game file size to a manageable 18.25 GB.

Note that Performance Mode is only available in Battle Royale and Creative modes (sorry Save the World players). If you want to play Fortnite on a tiny work PC or a hand-me-down gaming laptop, you can.