With this week's Epic v. Apple courtroom shenanigans going on, it's easy to miss out on any news coming out of Fortnite itself. While not as interesting as people shouting "free Fortnite" during legal proceedings, the release of Fortnite's performance mode, which will help players on minimum spec'd PCs get a bump in framerates, is still a pretty big deal.
According to the Fortnite team, performance mode is an "experimental new mode that offers significant performance gains by trading out visual quality to lower memory usage and lighten the load on CPU and GPU." So long as your system meets the minimum performance requirements, you should see a boost in, uh, performance.
You can turn on performance mode by heading into the video settings in Fortnite under Advanced Graphics and switching the rendering mode to 'Performance (Alpha).' The visual quality seems to drop dramatically to smooth out the framerate from the screenshot at the bottom.
Epic lists a couple of examples of performance mode delivering well over a 100% increase in framerate on systems running integrated graphics on both Intel and AMD systems set to 720p. A jump from 18fps to 45fps on a system with an AMD Radeon HD 8610G integrated graphics (launched in 2013) takes the game from being practically unplayable to somewhat competitive.
In addition to performance mode, you will now be able to opt-out of downloading high-resolution textures (16.44GB), shrinking the game file size to a manageable 18.25GB.
You should note that performance mode is only available for Battle Royale and Creative modes (sorry, Save the World players). If you're looking to play some Fortnite on a dinky work PC or hand-me-down gaming laptop, you have a pathway.
