Fortnite Framerate Settings Impact Test 2024

Fortnite was created in 2017 as a spin-off of the paid battle royale survival game Fortnite: Save the World. It was released in early access in September 2017 and saw a surge in popularity in 2020.

Currently, it is rather an environment that is used to launch various more or less complex mini-games, which also branch out into other genres. The game also has a creative mode, which can already be described as a simplified development environment for the Unreal Engine. In it, you can easily manage, for example, on a monthly basis.

Fortnite graphics settings

Fortnite’s graphics detail settings are, to put it mildly, overloaded. Apparently, this is a consequence of how the game’s engine has gradually improved, and with it a number of new effects and settings have been added.

The game offers three main rendering modes (Rendering mode), between which you can switch. And switching them requires restarting the entire game:

• DirectX 11
• Performance – lower graphics fidelity
• DirectX 12

Each rendering mode also gives you the option to choose from four global quality settings: Low, Medium, High, and Epic. And if you choose one of the following in the more detailed settings, a fifth “Custom” quality set will be added.

The graphics settings menu alone is about four scrolling screens long.

Anti-aliasing and 3D rendering resolution

In the game, you may notice that the 3D rendering resolution also changes depending on the detail setting. In other words, on lower presets, it is not rendered in the native resolution, but in a lower one.

The global preset changes the default resolution, but it’s not that easy, only with the Antialiasing Off, FXAA and TAA settings. Low sets it to 50%, Medium to 71%, High to 87% and Epic to 100%. So, with the resolution (Resolution) with the global setting Low, the game will display an image with a resolution of 960×540 pixels and upscale it to 1920×1080, the maximum Epic will run at is the native resolution of 1920×1080.

Settings Hardware Ray Tracing As described in the Fortnite documentation, enables higher quality global illumination and Lumen reflections, but may reduce performance. It is disabled by default in all settings, and can be enabled using the High and Epic global settings (or more accurately, if lumens are active, i.e. Global Illumination is set to Lumen High or Lumen Epic, or Reflections is set to Lumen High or Lumen Epic).

We’ll only pick a few basic scenarios for testing. We’ll focus more on the settings where Fortnite on the RTX 4070 doesn’t hit 500 fps and the graphics don’t make you feel like you’re playing Wolfenstein from 2003.

Testing methodology

I tested recording from scratch mode. Fortnite has the advantage in this regard that recording is almost as demanding on the computer’s performance as normal gameplay, and the frame rate measured during recording differs from normal gameplay by a level of measurement error.

The replays were less about conscious behavior and more about dropping and running around for a while in a more graphics-intensive environment. They start at exactly three minutes after landing on the ground.

Test set

To measure performance, I used the RTX 4070 Super Aero, a white card from Gigabyte.

• motherboard: Asus Z690P-WI-FI
• CPU: Intel Core i7-13700K@5.3 GHz
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB 32 GB (2 × 16 GB) DDR5 DRAM 6000 MHz C36 (36-36-36-36-76-2T)
• cooler: Noctua NH-D15S
• hard drive (OS + demanding games): Kingston Fury Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 2 TB
• hard drive (data, other games): WD Blue SATA 1TB Solid State Drive
• cabinet: Arc XL Fractal Design
• Fans: 3x Silent Wings 4 High Speed, 140mm; 4x Arctic P14 PWM PST, 140mm
• source: Corsair HX1000i (2022)
• Operating system: Windows 11 23H2 (VBS disabled)

Average frame rate and response

In the first series of tests, we will look at the performance comparison in individual modes and default settings. With these, the 3D rendering resolution is also changed by default using some anti-aliasing methods.

NVIDIA Reflex Impact on Reaction

For the reflex tests, I already chose the single detail setting, which is a sort of compromise between maximum performance and image quality. It also offers high enough frame rates for the fast 1080p and 1440p gaming monitors that the RTX 4070 Super is designed for.

I chose a setting that is primarily suited for higher frame rate gaming at 2560×1440 pixels and added measurements with the same settings at 1920×1080 and 3840×2160. This is a combination of the High graphics settings, the DX12 preset, and the Balanced DLSS mode.

FrameView measurements show that NVIDIA Reflex significantly reduces game responsiveness. Keep in mind that at lower frame rates on regular 60Hz monitors, the benefit of Reflex can be much greater.

Measuring response using OSLTT

To test the response time with hardware, I also used Nvidia’s freely available alternative to LDAT, OSLTT, an open-source latency testing tool. Among other things, it can simulate mouse action and uses a sensor to measure the change in screen brightness after the game reacts to the input stimulus. This way, it can tell you quite accurately how long it takes for the image on the monitor to react to the mouse movement.

And the most important thing is that it can do it very quickly. A hundred measurements for one setting can be repeated in a few minutes.

For my tests, I again used Gigabyte’s AORUS FO32U2P extreme gaming monitor, which features a 32-inch QD-OLED panel from Samsung.

I used the LEGO Fortnite mode to measure reactions with OSLTT. Unlike the online competition, here you have a much higher chance of surviving until the end of the measurement.

Summary

A trend that can be seen in new games can also be seen in Fortnite, namely, the use of new Unreal Engine technologies such as Nanite Virtualized Geometry or Lumen Global Illumination will significantly improve the visual aspect of the games.

However, this will also significantly increase the performance requirements of games on the hardware running Unreal Engine. A simple solution to maintain a more photorealistic game environment while reducing rendering requirements is to use supersampling. That is, the ability to render an image at a lower resolution and then help with more detailed graphics by reconstructing the image. You can argue about it, you can disagree with it, you can protest that everything is no longer rendered at its native resolution, but that’s all you can do about it.

However, at its core, it’s just a slightly different approach to what details you sacrifice during rendering and what you don’t want to sacrifice in the scene.

Thanks to latency reduction technologies like NVIDIA Reflex, supported by GeForce graphics cards, it is possible to achieve latency values ​​that without Reflex you would have to lower your graphics detail settings enough to achieve around half the frame rate.