Fortnite ray tracing and DLSS features coming this September

Nvidia announced some exciting news for Fortnite today during its Ampere event reveal. The popular battle royale is finally receiving RTX ray tracing and DLSS support, and the features are coming this month. An in-engine cinematic video debuted alongside the announcement showing off the Fortnite ray tracing effects. They certainly add a nice touch to the game, and the DLSS will provide some serious performance gains for Nvidia RTX users.

As we can see, RTX will provide high-fidelity reflections, accurate shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination.The most noteworthy improvement of course will be the reflections, which will appear on water, glass surfaces, visors, and more. RTX ray tracing will offer a massive boost over the current reflection options in Fortnite, and greatly increase clarity. The rest of the RTX enhancements will improve lighting. That’s not to say that the standard Fortnite lighting looks bad, but the Nvidia RTX 3000 series sounds ready to handle ray tracing with a nominal performance hit, so why not? These added effects certainly bump up Fortnite’s fidelity and will keep it looking good in 2020 and beyond.

Frames, frames, and more frames

Meanwhile, DLSS should get competitive players excited, because it uses AI to accurately upscale resolutions while maintaining strong performance. Technically this is the second iteration of DLSS, and Nvidia is quite proud of the results. You can find plenty of benchmarking videos about it, and it won’t take you long to realize what the fuss is all about. In some cases, DLSS can provide up to 40% gains in framerate. We don’t know the exact numbers for Fortnite yet, but you can certainly expect a markedly better experience soon. Given you have the hardware to support the feature, of course.

In addition to RTX ray tracing and DLSS, Fortnite will also benefit from Nvidia’s new Reflex technology, which will reduce latency. You can read about Reflex and see some interesting comparisons for the other Fortnite enhancements coming soon on Nvidia’s blog. The Nvidia RTX update will be available for all PC users that have 2000 or 3000 series GPUs.