The purpose of this article is to discuss the system requirements for Fortnite. We will talk about Fortnite, the published system requirements and its minimum, recommended, and epic requirements. You will also learn about what to expect with these system requirements in terms of FPS and performance. Lastly, you will learn about some popular processors and graphics cards that are not up to par for Fortnite’s system requirements.
Topics Discussed:
- About Fortnite
- Published System Requirements
- Minimum
- General Performance Expectations
- About the processor
- About the GPU
- About the hard disk drive
- About the RAM
- Recommended Graphics Settings
- Recommended
- General Performance Expectations
- About the processor
- About the GPU
- About the hard disk drive
- About the RAM
- Recommended Graphics Settings
- Epic
- General Performance Expectations, processor, GPU, HDD, RAM and Hard Disk Drive
- Minimum
- Conclusion
About Fortnite
Fortnite became an overnight success when it was released in 2017. In less than one year, over 125 million people had played the game. Fortnite is a first-person shooter with several battle-modes. The most popular battle-mode is the Battle Royale game where one hundred players are dropped into a large map. Teams of four are created and the surviving team wins the match. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that over 400 million people played Fortnite in 2021, making it one of the most games played that year.
Published System Requirements for Fortnite
The published system requirements for Fortnite are listed below and can be found online at Epic’s website. Game creators try to balance graphics quality and performance with modern technology to maximize the number of players that can play. Epic decided to release three requirement categories, Minimum, Recommended, and Epic. You fit into one of these categories depending on the PC hardware you have.
Minimum System Requirements
Graphics Card: Intel HD 4000 on PC; Intel Iris Pro 5200
Processor: Core i3-3225 3.3 GHz
RAM: 4GB RAM
The minimum system requirements are relatively a low entry point and allow for most people to play Fortnite at low quality presets. A core i3 Intel processor for example sells online anywhere from $40-$70. Charlie INTEL has a great guide for changing in-game graphics settings to maximize performance and FPS. You should follow the guide and change all your graphics settings down to low or off in order to have a smooth gaming experience.
Unfortunately, there are no published benchmarks to tell us how this game will perform with these hardware specifications. I would speculate that by using these system specs on Fortnite you would not have a smooth gaming experience. You should expect issues with stuttering and lag even with low presets (in-game graphics settings).
Performance Expectations
You should expect to play Fortnite using low or medium graphics presets across the board and still get at least 60 FPS with these specifications.
About the Processor
The Core i3-3225 3.3 GHz Intel processor has been discontinued. It was launched in 2012 and is a desktop processor with two cores and four threads (2-core / 4-thread). The highest amount of RAM it supports is a total of 32GB (which was a lot back then) and it also supported up to DDR3 1600Hz memory. These processors are largely out of circulation, and it would be surprising to find anyone playing Fortnite with them.
About the Graphics Card
The Intel® HD Graphics 4000 is embedded in the Intel processor. Compared to a dedicated (or discrete) graphics card, the performance of the Intel HD 4000 is paltry at best. You should consider adding a discrete graphics card from NVIDIA or AMD if you have an Intel i3 processor or similar. Using the embedded graphics processor will not serve you well.
About the RAM
You are required to have at least 4GB of RAM to meet the minimum specifications to play Fortnite. Although RAM does not necessarily improve FPS, it does help with multi-tasking. You could experience performance issues if you have too many applications running in the background while playing Fortnite. Once you run out of memory, everything becomes slow. 4GB is not a lot of RAM and could be quickly consumed (Windows 10 requires at least 1GB).
Recommended System Requirements
You can expect a huge performance increase by meeting the recommended system requirements for Fortnite. The recommended system requirements list a dedicated graphics card with at least 2GB of VRAM. The processor goes from the Ivy Bridge generation to Kaby Lake and an i3 to an i5 processor. and, instead of 4GB of RAM, it goes up to 8GB of RAM.
Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 960, AMD R9 280, or equivalent DX11 GPU
Graphics Memory (VRAM): 2 GB VRAM
Processor: Core i5-7300U 3.5 GHz, AMD Ryzen 3 3300U, or equivalent
RAM: 8 GB RAM or higher
Performance Expectations
You should expect to play Fortnite using medium or high graphics presets across the board and still get at least 60 FPS with these specifications.
About the Graphics Card
The biggest jump in game performance will come from the graphics card. The GeForce GTX 960 was released in 2015 and is comparable to the AMD R9 280. Both of these graphics cards are largely out of circulation and behind modern graphics cards. That being said, having a dedicated graphics card takes the graphics workload off of the processor and is dedicated to producing the image frames in a game. According to this video benchmark on Youtube by EDWARD Gaming, the GTX 960 was able to get an average of 58 FPS on 1080P resolution with medium presets.
About the Processor
The recommended requirements list a Kaby Lake i5 processor. You still get a 2-core 4-thread processor with up to 3.5GHz frequency with the Intel i5 7300U processor. The U on this processor denotes power efficiency for a laptop. That means that this processor cannot be overclocked. You will still get an increase increase in performance with this, and it is needed to align with the graphics card. If the processor had any less performance, it could be a bottleneck to gaming experience and FPS. You need a good processor to keep up with all of the other components and demands of your applications.
About the RAM
You need double the capacity of the minimum system requirements to meet the recommended requirements. No specification as to the speed or type of RAM is given. 8GB is still not a lot of RAM in today’s modern world of gaming. You need 16GB of RAM for example to run the recommended system requirements for Halo: Infinite and Elden Ring.
Epic Quality Presets Specifications
You will be able to play Fortnite the way it was meant to be played by having the system requirements for Epic quality presets. Epic quality presets nearly double the requirement of performance from processor, RAM, and graphics card over recommended requirements for Fortnite. You will be able to turn your in-game graphics settings to Epic across the board (or at least that’s the idea).
Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 1080, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, or equivalent GPU
Graphics Memory: 4 GB VRAM or higher
Processor: Intel Core i7-8700, AMD Ryzen 7 3700x or equivalent
RAM: 16 GB RAM or higher
Hard Drive: NVMe Solid State Drive
Performance Expectations
You should expect to play Fortnite using high or Epic graphics presets across the board and still get at least 60 FPS with these specifications.
About the Graphics Card
You need to have at least at least an GTX 1080 or RX 5700 XT graphics card for Fortnite’s Epic quality presets. These are still by no means the latest and greatest graphics cards. Both were released circa 2016-2017. Today’s graphics cards are much more powerful and have technologies like Ray Tracing and tensor cores to meet the demands of tomorrow’s game engines, like Unreal Engine 5. Nonetheless, both of these graphics cards have double the capacity of VRAM compared to recommended system requirements.
About the Processor
You need to have at least the Intel Core i7-8700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700x for Epic quality presets. Any later generation of i7 or Ryzen 7 will be fine as well. All Ryzen processors can overclock, but not all Intel processors will. You should look for an Intel processor that ends with the letter K if you want that (e.g. i7-8700K). These are unlocked processors. Both of these processors have been discontinued from production so if you bought an i7 or Ryzen 7 recently it should surpass this requirement.
About the RAM
Fortnite recommends you have at least 16GB of RAM to meet their Epic presets. This is in line with other modern AAA title’s recommended requirements. You should have at least 16GB of RAM if you are buying a new PC. You can multitask, listen to music, and have browser windows still open with 16GB of RAM.
About the Hard Disk Drive
We need a NVMe Solid State Drive to meet the Epic quality preset requirements for Fortnite. This is the first time Fortnite requires a specific type of hard drive, but it is an obvious requirement to have. You can get 6x the speed from NVMe drives because it connects directly into the motherboard via PCIe. You will be removing the bottleneck of performance away from the hard disk drive and putting it where it should be: the graphics card.
Conclusion
We can get a sense of general performance we will receive and what presets we can have by understanding these system requirements. Fortnite’s recommended requirements are less than most modern AAA games being released today. However, the Epic requirements are in line with new releases. One should keep in mind that new updates, seasons, and patches do have an impact on performance. Most recently, we saw an issue with an unrecoverable error happening when launching Fortnite. Others have reported stuttering and lag where they had not experienced it before. So, bear in mind that these requirements may not provide realistic expectations and you should seek for higher performance hardware.