NVIDIA and Epic Games announced that Fortnite — the epitome of battle royale gaming and a cultural phenomenon with more than 350 million players worldwide — is adding real-time ray tracing, AI-powered NVIDIA DLSS and other ground-breaking technologies, making the game more beautiful and even more responsive.
The game was featured as part of a GeForce® special event where NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the new GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs.
Currently, NVIDIA RTX GPUs are the only ones on the market with hardware support for ray tracing and AI. Gamers will experience these features in all Fortnite modes, as well as in a special new Creative mode map, called RTX Treasure Run, which has been specifically designed to highlight ray tracing.
Ray Tracing Comes to Fortnite
Fortnite will add four ray-traced features, for a more immersive gaming experience. These include:
- Ray-traced reflections – Recreates the way light reflects on glossy and metal surfaces, including smooth natural mirrors like window glass and rougher surfaces like brushed metal.
- Ray-traced shadows – Accurately models shadowing on many surfaces while enhancing surface and contact detail, and fixes problems associated with traditional shadow techniques.
- Ray-traced global illumination – Calculates world lighting with massively increased precision, illuminating Fortnite’s environments, players and characters with unprecedented detail, fidelity and clarity.
- Ray-traced ambient occlusion – Where objects or surfaces meet, light is occluded, creating subtle shadows that can highlight the slightest of surface details.
All told, ray tracing will bring a new level of detail and realism to Fortnite’s Battle Royale, Creative and Save the World modes.
Using AI to Boost Performance and Image Quality in Fortnite
NVIDIA DLSS, which uses AI and is powered by RTX Tensor Cores, is a deep learning neural network that boosts frame rates and generates beautiful, sharp images for games. It provides gamers the performance headroom to maximise quality settings and increase output resolution.
NVIDIA Reflex Comes to Fortnite
Fortnite is one of the first games to support NVIDIA Reflex, which measures and reduces system latency. Reflex allows gamers to improve responsiveness, increase aiming precision and tune their system for battle.
