Epic Games has launched Fortnite Chapter 4, ushering in a new season for the popular free-to-play Battle Royale game. It’s not just any other season either, since a brand new island has formed, featuring key locations such as The Citadel, Anvil Square, Brutal Bastion, and Frenzy Fields.
Gameplay additions include the Trail Trasher dirt bike, the ability to vault upon obstacles by sprinting toward them, randomized Reality Augments given to players at set intervals (provided that they are still alive), and of course, new weapons and healing items. Last but not least, Fortnite Chapter 4 improves Points of Interest in a couple of ways. Some of them picked randomly at the beginning of each match will be dubbed Hot Spots. These are filled with flying drones; once shot down, they’ll drop high-rarity weapons. POIs can also be claimed down by your squad by staying near the banner long enough, which will also reward players in that squad with loot.
Epic Games also improved the game’s graphics by updating Fortnite Chapter 4 to Unreal Engine 5.1. While the game already ran on Unreal Engine 5, the developers are now taking full advantage of its main features, chiefly Nanite and Lumen. Here’s the overview provided by Epic:
NANITE
Nanite provides highly-detailed architectural geometry. Specifically, buildings are rendered from millions of polygons in real time, and each brick, stone, wood plank, and wall trim is modeled. Natural landscapes are highly-detailed too. Individual trees have around 300,000 polygons, and each stone, flower, and blade of grass is modeled.
LUMEN
Lumen reflections provide high-quality ray traced reflections on glossy materials and water. Also, Lumen provides real-time global illumination at 60 FPS. You’ll see beautiful interior spaces with bounce lighting, plus characters reacting to the lighting of their surroundings. (For example, red rugs may bounce red light onto your Outfit.) Also, Outfits that have emissive (a.k.a. glowing) qualities will scatter light on nearby objects and surfaces.
VIRTUAL SHADOW MAPS
Virtual Shadow Maps allow for highly detailed shadowing. Each brick, leaf, and modeled detail will cast a shadow, and character self-shadowing is extremely accurate. This means that things like hats and other small details on characters will also cast shadows.
TEMPORAL SUPER RESOLUTION (TSR)
Temporal Super Resolution is an upgrade over Temporal Anti-Aliasing in Fortnite and allows for high-quality visuals at a high framerate.
You can check out a gallery of screenshots showing the upgraded visuals of Fortnite Chapter 4 below.
Do note that out of all those tech improvements, only Temporal Super Resolution has also been added to Fortnite Save the World and creator-made islands. To enable hardware ray tracing on a PC for Lumen GI and Reflections, you have to set GI and Reflections to Lumen High or Lumen Epic, and Nanite also has to be enabled. Do note that NVIDIA DLSS is currently disabled as Epic ensures that it works correctly in this new build.
On next-generation consoles (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X), Fortnite Chapter 4 players can still enjoy Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution, provided that they switch off the 120 FPS mode in the graphics section of video settings.
