Fortnite Chapter 4 sees the arrival of a brand-new island, plus the very cool additions of the Doom Slayer and Geralt of Rivia skins. But perhaps the most interesting addition is the support for cutting-edge Unreal Engine 5.1 features Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution.

Nanite is the new tech in Unreal Engine 5.1 that leads to incredible detail in objects, whilst Lumen is all about ray-traced reflections and impressive real-time global illumination. Temporal Super Resolution is Unreal's version of DLSS and FSR like upscaling.

The results are impressive.

NANITE

Nanite provides highly-detailed architectural geometry. Specifically, buildings are rendered from millions of polygons in real time, and each brick, stone, wood plank, and wall trim is modeled. Natural landscapes are highly-detailed too. Individual trees have around 300,000 polygons, and each stone, flower, and blade of grass is modeled.

LUMEN

Lumen reflections provide high-quality ray traced reflections on glossy materials and water. Also, Lumen provides real-time global illumination at 60 FPS. You’ll see beautiful interior spaces with bounce lighting, plus characters reacting to the lighting of their surroundings. (For example, red rugs may bounce red light onto your Outfit.) Also, Outfits that have emissive (a.k.a. glowing) qualities will scatter light on nearby objects and surfaces.

VIRTUAL SHADOW MAPS

Virtual Shadow Maps allow for highly detailed shadowing. Each brick, leaf, and modeled detail will cast a shadow, and character self-shadowing is extremely accurate. This means that things like hats and other small details on characters will also cast shadows.

TEMPORAL SUPER RESOLUTION (TSR)

Temporal Super Resolution is an upgrade over Temporal Anti-Aliasing in Fortnite, and allows for high-quality visuals at a high framerate.

The update is available on PC and consoles, where on PC these features are limited to the DirectX 12 version of the game with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 or newer recommended for Nanite. To enable the visual update on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S you'll need to disable "120 FPS Mode" in the settings.

And with that here's a look at the Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1 Launch Trailer.