What is Ray Tracing in Fortnite?

You have no doubt heard the news about Fortnite getting the ability to enable Ray Tracing. What this does might be a mystery to you, especially if you play on a console. If you are a PlayStation, Xbox, mobile, or Nintendo player then you don't really need to worry about it, because Ray Tracing is not available on those devices. We'll take a quick look at what you can expect from this new addition to the game in this post.

What is Ray Tracing?

It adds a new rendering capability that allows for higher quality visual and lightning effects that weren't possible in the past. You will get improved ambient occlusion, shadows, reflections and real-time global illumination. In other words, it makes the game look a whole lot better.

How do I get Ray Tracing in Fortnite

The first thing you will need is a NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card. This is the bare minimum requirement, because the RTX on the card series literally stands for Ray Tracing. If you don't have a RTX card, then you can't get it. Here are the rest of the minimum requirements:

• Requires DirectX 12
• CPU: 4 cores or more
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or higher (use updated drivers; 450.00 and higher are supported)
• Windows 10 version 1903 (May 2019 Update, build number 18362 or newer)

If you have all of that then you should be good to go in terms of hardware and software. Once you've got all that setup, you can head into Fortnite and go to the Settings. Scroll down and look for Advanced Settings and change your DirectX Version to DirectX 12. You can also change DLSS to Quality, Balance, and Performance based on how powerful a computer you have. Look for the Ray Tracing option and enable it. You can set the various options below it to meet with what you are looking to achievement. Max them all out for a beautiful gaming experience, but a lower framerate. If you're a competitive player, then you will likely want to steer clear of these settings altogether.

RTX Examples

You can find further examples on the NVIDIA blog post, but I've included some below. You will notice that the RTX versions have much softer light and the shadows diffuse in a more natural way. The normal version of the game has much sharper shadows, and they don't look as natural.

You can see the difference in textures and color sharpness in the following screenshot. The paint looks far more detailed and is lit in a more natural manner. The shadows under the truck look completely different and darken a whole lot better in the RTX version.

Here's a great video that shows off the power of RTX! The lighting, reflections, and shadows are much improved and everything has a much higher quality look to it.