Ray Tracing and DLSS are coming for Fortnite on September 17th
Ray Tracing and DLSS are coming for Fortnite on September 17th
This release will coincide with the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 3080 graphics card, which is due to release tomorrow at 2 PM BST. Fortnite’s Ray Tracing Patch will make the game one of the best looking Unreal Engine games available, delivering PC games significant graphical upgrades. Thankfully, the addition of Nvidia’s DLSS technology will help to mitigate the hardware demands of real-time ray tracing.
Ray Tracing in Fortnite will come in the form of ray-traced reflections, ray-traced shadows, ray-traced ambient occlusion and ray-traced global illumination. All of these changes will deliver significant image quality improvements to Fortnite, making the game look more like a CGI movie than a game.
Below are some images which showcase Fortnite’s ray tracing patch with “RTX On” and “RTX Off”. Nvidia provided these images.
Fortnite’s ray-tracing comes through Epic Games’ use of the DXR API, which means that the games ray tracing implementation should be supported by non-Nvidia DXR compatible hardware. This means that AMD’s upcoming RDNA 2 architecture should support Fortnite’s new ray-tracing features.
Sadly, Nvidia’s DLSS technology will not be supported by non-Nvidia hardware. DLSS is an AI-powered image upscaling technology which can enable increased performance levels by using Nvidia’s Tensor cores to boost framerates using AI compute. The image quality of DLSS is similar to that of native resolution rendering, which can sometimes look better than native rendering depending on your circumstances.
Nvidia has also created an RTX showcase map for Fortnite using the game’s creative mode. This map will include several explorable areas as well as a free “hidden treasures”.
You can join the discussion on Fortnite gaining support for ray tracing and DLSS on September 17th on the OC3D Forums.