At first glance, Fortnite might look like a game that does not require a strong system to run effectively. That is, until you fire it up on your PC. You’ll discover that Fortnite is one of those process-heavy games that requires a medium to high-range PC.
What’s more, a milliseconds delay or input lag and you’re out of the game thanks to how competitive Fortnite is. If you really want to excel in this game, then having a good system is key. But, what if you don’t have one? Well, you’re in luck as ‘Performance Mode’ has arrived for PC users.
Performance mode is similar to Nvidia’s DLSS feature… but not quite. It enhances the game’s overall performance by reducing the load on the CPU and GPU, at the cost of visuals. The performance mode is specifically targeted towards low-end systems, in order to provide them better FPS.
The performance mode will be available for all PC users regardless of their system. However, the game will notify and prompt players with older hardware to try it out, given that they stand to benefit the most.
You can find the performance mode, in its current alpha state, as one of the rendering modes under Advanced Graphics in the Video settings menu. You can enable or disable it at any time and must restart the game for changes to take effect.
To further enhance gaming performance and FPS, players can now also opt-out of high-resolution textures through the Epic Games Launcher options. This is done by following the steps below:
- Open the Epic Games Launcher
- Click on Library (located on the left side of the launcher)
- Locate Fortnite and click on the three dots to toggle the settings menu
- Click on Options
- Uncheck or check the box next to ‘High Resolution Textures’
The high-resolution textures alone make up almost half of the overall game size, currently comprising up to 14 GB. Fortnite Core and Battle Royale mode are only about 17.3 GB. With the high-resolution textures, the game’s size goes up to 31 GB. So removing these unnecessary textures not only helps improve FPS but also save space on your hard drive.
Performance mode will work even better for systems running the game on an SSD or those that have at least 6GB RAM or higher. The performance mode will work specially well for laptops as they tend to have the most FPS issues while gaming.
Epic Games tested out the performance mode on two different laptops with and both showed promising results. The first laptop had an Intel i5-8265U @ 1.60GHz, 8GB RAM, and Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU. It was running the game at 24 FPS using 720p. After applying the performance mode, the FPS jumped to a consistent 61 FPS. Similarly, another laptop with AMD A10-5745M APU @ 2.1Ghz, 6GB RAM, and AMD Radeon HD 8610G GPU had an FPS increase from 18 FPS to 45 FPS.
There’s a significant increase in the FPS and overall performance, according to the tests. It is safe to say that players with a low-end PC will be able to enjoy the game just as much as the players with the high-end rig, excluding the visuals, of course.
Here is an in-game screenshot taken by folks over at Epic Games to show the visuals after enabling the performance mode on 720p with high-resolution textures disabled.
