Something to look forward to: Fortnite players with powerful PCs are about to benefit from an “Epic” visual boost when Chapter 2 Season 7 (v17.00) arrives on June 8. Adding “improved storm and cloud effects, as well as enhanced simulations for smoke and liquid,” Fortnite will soon look better than ever – so long as your PC is equipped to cope.
The upcoming changes mean that explosions, fire, and content like slurp, clouds, and the ever-encroaching Storm will all look a lot better. What’s more, post-processing features like bloom and lens flare will also be added, alongside more general visual tweaks to environments. According to Epic Games, the changes are launching in both Fortnite’s Battle Royale and Creative modes.
If you’ve seen or played Fortnite on one of the latest generation consoles, like the PS5, you’ll have an idea of how the visual improvements will look – they already have the “Epic” graphics applied.
Of course, running enhanced graphics on your PC could mean the need for enhanced hardware. Epic has detailed the requirements as follows:
- Nvidia GTX 1080, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, or equivalent GPU
- 4 GB VRAM or higher
- Intel Core i7-8700, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, or equivalent
- 16 GB RAM or higher
- NVMe solid state drive
- Windows 10 64-bit
Epic adds: “Unrelated to the new visual changes, the Recommended GPU will become Nvidia GTX 960, AMD R9 280, or equivalent DX11 GPU when v17.00 releases. Also, we’re changing the official Recommended OS to Windows 10 64-bit, but please note that players on Windows 7 64-bit and Windows 8 64-bit can still run Fortnite at optimal performance.”
Other than that, Fortnite’s recommended PC requirements remain the same:
- Nvidia GTX 960, AMD R9 280, or equivalent DX11 GPU
- 2 GB VRAM
- Core i5-7300U 3.5 GHz
- 8 GB RAM
- Windows 10 64-bit
And the game’s minimum PC requirements are unchanged:
- Intel HD 4000 on PC; Intel Iris Pro 5200
- Core i3-3225 3.3 GHz
- 4 GB RAM
- Windows 7/8/10 64-bit
Fortnite’s Chapter 2 Season 7 (v17.00) PC update arrives on June 8, giving you a few days to prepare for those updated graphics. You can download Fortnite free of charge here.