Fortnite Chapter 4 debuts with Unreal Engine 5.1

Fornite Battle Royale Chapter 4 arrived today, and it makes use of Unreal Engine 5.1, Epic Games announced.

The debut shows how tightly Epic Games ties its overall strategy together. Fortnite is the prime revenue generator for the company, reaching tens of millions of players who buy in-game items. And Unreal Engine is the game developer tool that makes the advances in Chapter 4 available. To sell developers on the engine, Epic eats its own dog food by building Fortnite with Unreal to showcase what it can do.

Unreal Engine 5.1 provides new features that make the game look and run better. Unreal Engine 5 itself debuted earlier this year, and it ushers in a generational leap in visual fidelity, bringing a new level of detail to game worlds like the Battle Royale Island.

Next-gen Unreal Engine 5 features such as Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution — all features that can make Fortnite Battle Royale shine on next-generation systems such as PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and cloud gaming.

Epic Games said that over half of all announced next-gen games are being created with Unreal Engine. And it said developers can now take advantage of updates to the Lumen dynamic global illumination and reflections system. This is important stuff if you’re a game developer or you’re expecting to build the metaverse.

Epic has made updates to the Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and virtual shadow maps that lay the groundwork for games and experiences running at 60 frames per second (fps) on next-gen consoles and capable PCs. These improvements will enable fast-paced competition and detailed simulations without latency, Epic said.

Additionally, Nanite has also added a programmable rasterizer to allow for material-driven animations and deformations via world position offset, as well as opacity masks. This development paves the way for artists to use Nanite to program specific objects’ behavior, for example Nanite-based foliage with leaves blowing in the wind.

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.

On top of that, Lumen reflections provide high-quality ray traced reflections on glossy materials and water.

Also, Lumen provides real-time global illumination at 60 frames per second (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 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 is an upgrade over Temporal Anti-Aliasing in Fortnite and allows for high-quality visuals at a high framerate.

With the introduction of these UE5 features in Fortnite Battle Royale, Fortnite’s Video settings have changed on PC. You can see them here.

To run Nanite, the minimum hardware requirements are Nvidia Maxwell-generation cards or newer or AMD GCN-generation cards or newer.

For Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution to be available in Fortnite on your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S, make sure the “120 FPS Mode” setting (in the “graphics” section of the Video settings) is set to off.

Unreal’s reach has grown well beyond games. Unreal Engine has now been used on over 425 film and TV productions, and is integrated into over 300 virtual production stages worldwide. Unreal Engine usage in animation has grown exponentially, from 15 productions between 2015 and 2019 to over 160 productions from 2020 to 2022.