Xbox Series X|S owners just got an awesome free Fortnite graphics upgrade

Fortnite Season 4 Xbox Series X comparison

(Image credit: Epic games)

published 8 December 2022

If you're a Fortnite player with an Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X you're going to love Fortnite Battle Royale Chapter 4: it delivers an absolutely massive graphical upgrade with vastly improved lighting and realism. The image above shows the technology in action: the left hand side of the image shows the original, and the right hand side shows the same image with the new graphics capabilities.

The news was posted to Twitter by Epic Games' engineering fellow Daniel Wright, who posted multiple examples of the new graphics tech. It's making use of new features in the Unreal Engine 5.1 including Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, Temporal Super Resolution and Lumen, which collectively deliver much more intense and realistic visuals at 60fps.

Why you need a next-gen Xbox to see Fortnite at its best

If you have an Xbox One, unfortunately you won't be able to benefit from the improved Xbox graphics; sadly they're just too demanding for your console. And if you do have an S or an X, make sure you're not playing at 120fps: the new graphics improvements are only currently available in 60fps mode.

The improved graphics aren't all that’s new in Fortnite Chapter 4: there's a whole new island, a new vehicle, new boosts and of course, new weapons too. I've included the chapter trailer below.

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).