Epic Games’ build-and-battle game, Fortnite, isn’t scheduled to release officially until next year in 2018. However, the game will enter into Early Access soon enough and this will allow gamers to get a taste of the title before it becomes free-to-play next year. The real news, however, is that the game will release on the Xbox One X and PS4 on July 25th in Early Access alongside the Steam version, and it will be 4K at 30fps on both consoles.
The news comes courtesy of executive producer Zak Phelps, who told GamingBolt…
“Resolution and frame rate is all dependent on your PC and what you can run. PS4 Pro, Xbox X, it’s going to look really good in 4K. We’re going to allow the resolutions that we can support and frame rate at 30 frames per second.
“We’ve turned on several key PC pieces on epic settings. We’re able to run the game on Xbox, Xbox One X, and PS4 Pro.”
Phelps doesn’t mention which “key PC pieces” have been turned up to the “epic” settings, but I doubt it would be any features that would prohibitively work against the performance of the game on the PS4 Pro or Xbox One X. Shadow resolution, tessellation, and SSAO are likely off the table, but it would be a real feat if Epic managed to crank those settings up tot he max on the home consoles and manage to get the game to run at 4K.
In some ways it makes you wonder if the game is being held back on the Xbox One X, which can run games like Super Lucky’s Tale at 4K and 60 frames per second, along with Forza Motorsport 7, which is both visually impressive and visually taxing based on things like dynamic light shifting, random weather routines, and realtime planar reflection rendering based on time of day, track conditions and surface properties. Simply put, Forza Motorsport 7 is easily the most advanced looking racing simulator set to arrive on the market this year, and it’s packing a lot of visual heft under the hood, and it certainly outclasses Gran Turismo Sport in basic graphics comparisons.
In way, it makes you question: if Forza Motorsport 7 can run all of that and at 4K and 60fps, what’s preventing it from running a game like Fortnite at 60fps as well?
Unfortunately Phelps doesn’t entertain the prospective differences between the consoles and the decision to limit the frame-rate to 30fps on both the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, but this sort of news – along with Destiny 2 being limited to 4K at 30fps – certainly leaves a lingering suspicion that performance parity may be at play on Sony’s end.
