Fortnite
This week sees the early access launch of Fortnite on PlayStation 4 – a brand new ‘action builder' that brings together base-building, class-based tactics and good old-fashioned co-op shooting. As with Epic's prior release, Paragon, PS4 Pro owners can look forward to a range of visual upgrades.
While the game renders at a native 1080p, the team have poured the extra power of PS4 Pro into dialling up the bells and whistles for a greatly improved overall visual presentation.
Scene lighting gets a huge boost with the inclusion of light shafts, screen-space subsurface scattering and a four-fold increase in volumetric lighting resolution. All in all, this delivers a far more refined and natural simulation of real-world lighting, backed up by a higher quality ambient occlusion (which creates more realistic shading around objects and characters) and higher quality reflections across the scene thanks to a sampling boost in screen space reflections.
Visual effects also see an improvement, with spawn rate for particles being doubled to create fuller, more impressive ballistic effects that also benefit from interaction with scene lighting, making their appearance more natural within the environment.
Taking into account the fast-paced action of the game, not only is motion blur improved on PS4 Pro hardware, creating a more natural sense of movement, the temporal anti-aliasing (which smooths out jagged edges and improves the clarity of fine detail on objects and textures) has an additional feature called ‘dynamic anti-ghosting', which cleverly improves image quality around rapidly moving objects.
All of this is important too, as – owing to 25% increase in draw distance – there'll be more objects visible from greater distances and more detail to take in.
Last, but certainly not least, all of these excellent refinements are bolstered by a performance boost throughout, giving a more consistent overall gameplay experience.
