Fortnite to support RTX ray tracing on Nvidia graphics cards

By Jon Martindale Published September 17, 2020

Nvidia has teamed up with Epic Games to bring its RTX technology to Fortnite, adding its ray tracing to the world’s most popular competitive game. That means real-time ray-traced reflections, ray-traced shadows, ambient occlusion, and support for the second-generation of Nvidia’s deep learning super sampling (DLSS) technology.

That should make the game look better than ever before, but also open up the option of improved performance, and even the potential for new competitive tricks made possible through tracking the shadows and other effects created by the actions of your opponents.

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While ray tracing took some time to build up steam after its original debut on Nvidia’s RTX 2000-series Turing graphics cards, it’s now supported by a wider array of games than ever before. It’s also been shown to make a dramatic impact on the visuals of even low-tech games like Minecraft, leading to near life-like visuals.

Fortnite Ray Tracing — Image used with permission by copyright holder

An early look at ray tracing in Fortnite during Nvidia’s major technology announcement in September didn’t showcase a true-to-life Fortnite world, but it did look pretty.

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Perhaps Epic can leverage this new partnership in its ongoing legal scuffle with Apple and Google.

Follow along with Nvidia’s other announcements as the event continues live.

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Evergreen writer

Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…

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The back of the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super graphics card.

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First, the good news. Wccftech cites its own sources as it reports that the RTX 5080 will get 32Gbps memory modules from the get-go -- a significant upgrade over the RTX 5090 with its 28Gbps. The best part is that such a memory upgrade would bring the RTX 5080 to a whopping 1TB/s of total bandwidth, marking a huge improvement over the RTX 4080 Super, which maxes out at 736GB/s.

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The RTX 4090 sitting alongside the Fractal Terra case.

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RTX 4090.

Update: According to MEGAsizeGPU on X (formerly Twitter), the following might be a mistranslation. The source reportedly talks about Nvidia finalizing the design for Blackwell in September instead of launching the card. No details about the release date have been confirmed. The original article follows below.

Nvidia's RTX 50-series graphics cards are coming -- we know that for a fact. But when? The release dates of these graphics cards have been the topic of much speculation. Early leakers predicted that they'd launch in late 2024, but the general consensus slowly shifted toward an early 2025 release instead.