Yesterday, I would have described "Fortnite" as a great looking game out there that runs in any environment. After today's massive Chapter 4 update, I would describe Fortnite as a graphical showcase of how beautiful the next generation of 3D games can look.

Fortnite's all-new multi-biome map is a saturated landscape wonderland that shines even brighter after turning on Epic's proprietary real-time ray-traced global illumination and reflection options.

This is all thanks to Fortnite Chapter 4's switch to Unreal Engine 5.1 (opens in new tab), which enabled Epic's Nanite "virtualized geometry" technology and Lumen lighting/reflection technology, Epic, Epic describes Nanite as a way to improve texture detail (Nanite is what made the PS5 tech demo of "Matrix Awakening" (open in new tab) look so good), but warns that turning it on may degrade Fortnite's performance. It warns that turning it on may degrade Fortnite's performance.

Turning on Nanite (located under the "Display" tab) unlocks several other key graphics options: virtual shadows, lumen lighting, and lumen reflection. I enjoy the raytraced reflections and lighting, although the dynamic shadows look good with the frequent time-of-day shifts of the new map.

Ice-reflected trees and beautifully lit branches are nothing new to PC gamers who have enjoyed ray-tracing capable GPUs for the past few years. These pretty reflections are with hardware ray tracing set to off. Optionally, the tensor cores of the RTX card can be freed up on Lumen for higher quality results, but this (again) risks performance degradation.

When it comes to performance, turning on all the best lighting/reflection options will definitely reduce fps. I'm running RTX 3060 at 1080p with lumen reflection and lighting on the second highest setting and I'm averaging about 75 fps. This is also with Unreal Engine 5's new Temporal Super Resolution (an upscaling technology that replaces DLSS) turned on (side note: Epic has disabled DLSS in Fortnite, but this is only temporary). I am happy with how the game looks, but it is not perfect. The annoying stuttering when loading into the pre-game lobby and the frame rate dropping periodically are a bit annoying. If I were serious about playing Fortnite, I would turn off all the bells and whistles that keep me away from 144 fps, but since I'm not, the trade-off is worth it for now.

The upscaling of TSR also brings some graphic oddities to the first minute or so of a match. Characters in motion sometimes leave a distracting grainy blur. I have noticed that this looks especially bad when looking closely at the skins of cel-shaded characters. This is a ghosting effect similar to what used to happen (and is still present in some games) in older versions of DLSS.

Some evolutions are more impactful than others; Epic also mentions that Lumen lighting introduces bounce, reflective lighting to interiors; when I played "Metro Exodus" with RTX on, this feature was incredibly impressive, but I have yet to see a significant difference in "Fortnite". So far, to my eyes, the building interiors look about the same as before. This may be a testament to Fortnite's strong art direction.

What Fortnite Chapter 4 has done here is unprecedented in the age of service games. A game that can be played on everything from cell phones to the Nintendo Switch, Fortnite has become a graphics powerhouse with features that Epic recommends only for PCs with RTX 2080 or higher. We don't usually expect a developer to bring a significant graphical evolution to a game that has already been released, and Epic has shown that they are changing "Fortnite" to keep up with the times, not only in gameplay but also in look and feel.

To be clear, this is not an altruistic update for Epic. This is the makers of Unreal Engine 5 showing off what they can do with their product in hopes that more studios will jump on board Epic's battle bus, one of the largest entertainment platforms in the world. That said, given the big games that have already announced their adoption of UE5, including Redfall (opens in new tab), Stalker 2 (opens in new tab), Tekken 8 (opens in new tab), and The Witcher 4 (opens in new tab), it's hard to imagine Epic needing any more I don't know if they need any more convincing.

While I think some of these games are much better showcases for UE5 than the cartoonish world of Fortnite, Chapter 4 is an impressive debut and a peek into the technology that some of the big games of the near and far future will have access to It's cool to ...