Nvidia's been on a roll since 2018, with a number of games adding ray tracing support to use with the brand's best graphics cards. With a limited number of titles supporting the feature, however, the past two years have brought lackluster popularity for RTX. Now, Nvidia's promising "hundreds" of games in development with ray tracing, so things could change -- especially with Nvidia announcing today that Fortnite is getting Nvidia RTX support on September 17.
Fortnite isn't just getting a few ray tracing features here and there; it's getting the full RTX treatment from Nvidia. That includes ambient occlusion, reflections, shadows and global illumination.
The game is also getting DLSS 2.0 support and the recently announced Nvidia Reflex Latency Analyzer, which helps players to reduce and measure input lag.
Fortnite Ray Tracing
Fortnite is getting the whole gamut of ray tracing tech, making it the only game outside of Control to feature all three in one game. It will also be the only game to include all three, plus global illumination, which "adds additional bounced light that is otherwise impossible to simulate in Fortnite," as Nvidia put it.
Most ray-traced games only feature one ray tracing lighting feature, due to the infancy of the technology and how demanding ray tracing is on Turing-based GPUs. But that's shifting with Control proving it can be done and Nvidia's new Ampere graphics cards.
Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs bring enhancements to ray tracing accelerated performance, so there should be no issues running 3-4 ray tracing features simultaneously.
Fornite will use as many ray-traced reflections as possible. The effect will appear on bodies of water, windows, player character models, weapon effects and more.
Ray-traced shadows, meanwhile, are a drastic change from Fortnite's default shadows, which are very sharp and offer no softening whatsoever. RTX will allow shadows to be softer and more realistic, changing based on your distance from the shadow.
The additions of ambient occlusion and global illumination will change how light interacts with objects themselves, and ray tracing them will bring realism to shadows and colors.
"With ray tracing, we can make ambient occlusion shadowing far more accurate, further improving Fortnite’s fidelity," Nvidia claimed.
RTX Treasure Run
To celebrate the arrival of ray tracing in Fornite, Nvidia's kicking off a new Creative Mode map called the RTX Treasure Run. Gamers will be dropped at the entrance of a new museum and challenged with a scavenger hunt. As you progress through the map, you'll get to see all the ray tracing tech in action through mirrors, jungles statues and more.
The patch to include RTX support will drop September 17. We'd expect Nvidia to drop a Game Ready driver as well.
