If you play Fortnite on PC and your system can cope with the “Epic” graphics settings, prepare for a major visual upgrade next week when the next season launches.
As Epic Games explains, when Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 7 (v17.00) arrives on June 8, both Battle Royale and Creative modes will benefit from “improved Storm and cloud effects, as well as enhanced simulations for smoke and liquid.” In other words, effects such as explosions and fire will look noticeably better. These effects should be further enhanced by postprocessing features (bloom, lens flare) and the quality of shadows being improved. Environments in general should also benefit from the visual tweaks.
Of course, such a visual upgrade doesn’t come without a requirement for better PC hardware. Epic is introducing system requirements for running on the Epic quality settings so you can check to see if your system will cope.
Those requirements are as follows:
- Intel Core i7-8700, AMD Ryzen 7 3700x, or equivalent
- Nvidia GTX 1080, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, or equivalent GPU
- 4 GB VRAM or higher
- 16 GB RAM or higher
- NVMe Solid State Drive
- Windows 10 64-bit
If you’ve seen Fortnite played on the latest generation of consoles, they already have the Epic quality enhancements applied. That should give you some idea of what to expect from the PC version next week.
The most problematic of those requirements is likely to be the 16GB of RAM needed, especially for anyone who plays using a laptop as 8GB is much more typical. The recommended spec for the game only requires 8GB of RAM, though, so you’ll continue to experience the game with a high visual quality, it just won’t be Epic quality. And if you have an older PC, don’t worry, Epic has you covered.
