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Fortnite Frame Rate Decides How Fast Your Guns Fire, Epic Games 'Investigating a Fix'

Fortnite Frame Rate Decides How Fast Your Guns Fire, Epic Games 'Investigating a Fix'

By Rishi Alwani | Updated: 24 January 2019 21:24 IST

This impacts Fortnite players with smartphones and the Nintendo Switch that target 30fps

Highlights

This puts mobile and Nintendo Switch gamers at a disadvantage
Epic Games is aware of the issue
PUBG has a similar problem

It appears that your frame rate in Fortnite has a direct impact on fast your guns fire. What this means is, the higher your frame rate is, the higher your rate of fire. While this wouldn't be a problem in most cases, it poses some glaring concerns for Fortnite's promise of crossplay. Reason being, the Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android versions of Fortnite target 30fps compared to the PS4, Xbox One, and PC versions of the game that can go much higher. This can result in some weapons like the Siegebreaker, Viper, or Cyclone not firing as fast as they can if you're playing on a device that's capped at 30fps.

"30fps does indeed lag behind. It crumbled the final wall in 27.52 seconds, compared to 26.08 seconds while running at 60fps," reads a report from video game tech analysis site Digital Foundry.

"That's a 1.44 second difference, or put another way, a 5.24 per cent speed advantage for the 60fps player overall. A second, repeat test puts this figure even higher - at 6.45 per cent - proving there is a variance between tests. All told though, the average player may not notice right away, but for professional play, it's a significant and repeatable advantage."

Thankfully, Epic Games is aware of the issue and has said it will be issuing a fix.

"We're aware of this issue and are investigating a fix," an Epic spokesperson confirmed to Digital Foundry. "We'll update players as soon as we have more information."

Fortnite isn't the only game on the Unreal Engine 4 facing this issue. It was discovered that PUBG has the same concerns too.

The ramifications of this PUBG bug are far greater, as astute Redditor MutuTutu discovered. This Redditor found that each weapon in PUBG performs differently at different frame rates, so there's a “sweet spot” in terms of frame rate for every weapon. The closer your frame rate is to that sweet spot, the better your PUBG weapon will perform. MutuTutu has compiled this in a neat spreadsheet, which you can check out here.

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