Fortnite just got a bit shinier – that is, if you’ve got the hardware to support ray tracing. As was foretold in the ancient times of two weeks ago, Fortnite now supports both ray tracing and Nvidia DLSS, and it’s also added support for the new Nvidia Reflex technology.
What’s it all mean? Well, it means if you have a powerful graphics card and can run DirectX 12, you can enable ray tracing effects in Fortnite’s options menu, right now. DLSS lets you play at higher resolutions while boosting performance, and Reflex promises to deliver lower latency to keep your crosshairs feeling snappy.
It’s the ray-traced global illumination and lighting that you’re going to really notice, though. Using this rendering technique means you’ll be able to see real-time reflections and shadows cast by objects as the light sources around them move and change. You’ll see your own reflection in shop windows and mirrors, and the glint of sun reflecting off the lens of a sniper’s scope in the distance. According to the Fortnite blog, there’s a special island that Nvidia’s set up to show off the effects, and you can find it by using the code 9189-0518-5408.
Make sure you have the latest versions of Windows 10 and your graphics drivers installed, then head into Fortnite and open the settings menu. From there, select Advanced Settings and switch the DirectX version to DirectX 12.
Once that’s done, you can fiddle around with several ray tracing and DLSS settings. You can turn ray tracing and shadows on or off, and then select quality levels for reflections, ambient occlusion, and global illumination. DLSS can run in quality, balanced, or performance modes.
Epic recommends at a minimum having a CPU with at least four cores and an Nvidia RTX 2060 or better to enable ray tracing in Fortnite.
Does ray tracing make Fortnite a better battle royale game? Probably not by much – if at all – but those reflections sure do look pretty.