Epic Games has announced that Fortnite has officially begun the transition to Unreal Engine 5 with the release of Fortnite Battle Royale Chapter 4, bringing with it a host of new features including Nanite, Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps.
Lumen is able to implement real-time global illumination at 60 FPS, which means interior spaces will now sparkle with bounce lighting, while characters will react to the light of their surroundings. Meanwhile, Nanite adds highly-detailed architectural geometry, such as buildings now being rendered from millions of polygons in real time.
This also means that features such as individual trees boast around 300,000 polygons, while each stone flower and blade of grass is individually modelled.
With Virtual Shadow Maps, objects such as bricks, leaves and modelled detail will all cast a shadow, while self-shadowing for characters are rendered with high accuracy. In other words, even the likes of hats and other small details on characters will now cast their own shadows.
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.
Fortnite Battle Royale is now available for PS4, PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One.
[Source – Epic Games]