Fortnite is getting improved graphics on PC

Fortnite’s Windows PC version is about to get a notable graphics update on PC, Epic announced on Thursday morning. When Fortnite’s next season — chapter 2, season 7 — hits live servers next week, there will be a new level of graphics quality settings for players with machines powerful enough to take advantage of it.

Epic is updating the quality preset options in Fortnite. Players who turn their graphics settings to “High” will now get the same visuals that players who set their graphics to “Epic” used to get. Those who use the Epic setting will get even better visuals than before, including Storm effects, as well as “cooler-looking explosions, fire, and Slurp effects,” according to Epic Games. Players on the highest graphics setting will also see better post-processing effects with various lightning features, like bloom, lens flare, and shadows. Epic introduced many of these effects with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of Fortnite last fall, and is now bringing them to PC.

“With this new update, Epic PC visual effects will now be on par with next-gen consoles,” a spokesperson for Epic Games told Polygon, speaking about the graphics setting. Of course, the PC version of Fortnite has supported ray tracing since September.

Because of these visual upgrades, the Epic graphics setting will now require a more powerful PC. Since the High quality preset will now be the old Epic, the PC specifications will go up for that setting as well. However, Epic isn’t abandoning players with lower-quality PCs: Both “Low” and “Medium” preset players will see no changes graphically or to their performance.

Here are Epic Games’ hardware specifications for players who want to run Fortnite on the new Epic setting:

• 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 Games is also changing Fortnite’s recommended PC specifications with the upcoming update, although it says the change is unrelated to the visual improvements. The recommended GPU will now be an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon R9 290, and the operating system is changing to Windows 10 64-bit (although Epic Games said that “players on Windows 7 64-bit and Windows 8 64-bit can still run Fortnite at optimal performance”). Here are the full new recommended specs:

• 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

Fortnite’s minimum specifications will not change:

• Intel HD 4000 on PC; Intel Iris Pro 5200
• Core i3-3225 3.3 GHz
• 4 GB RAM
• Windows 7/8/10 64-bit

These changes should all arrive in-game the week of June 7.