Fortnite's Optimisations for Android, iOS, and Switch to Benefit All Developers With Unreal Engine 4.20

Gamer and game developers will have Fortnite to thank for several improvements to the latest version of Unreal Engine. Dubbed as Unreal Engine 4.20, it sports optimisations for Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android platforms that were originally devised for Epic Games' battle royale sensation. What this means is, we should see other games for mobile and Nintendo Switch look and play better thanks to these additions to the Unreal Engine as well as a shorter delay for games arriving on multiple platforms. Some tweaks such as Fortnite's shading model to better match the PC version also make their way to Unreal Engine 4.20, which should bridge the gap between the PC and mobile versions in terms of visual fidelity.

"Unreal Engine 4.20 brings well over 100 mobile optimisations developed for Fortnite on iOS and Android, marking a major shift for developers in terms of ability to more easily ship games and seamlessly optimise gameplay across platforms. Major enhancements include improved Android debugging, mobile landscape improvements, and occlusion queries on mobile," a post from Epic Games reads.

As for Nintendo Switch improvements. Epic listed them point by point as follows.

Fortnite Nintendo Switch optimisations in Unreal Engine 4.20

• Support for Dynamic Resolution and Temporal Upsampling
• Low Latency Frame Syncing for Controller Input
• Significant CPU Rendering Optimisations
• Improvements to Threading
• Better Texture Compression
• Support for Memory Profiling
• Backbuffer support for 1080p while in docked mode

Previously, Epic announced it was going all-in with Amazon Web Services for Fortnite and upcoming projects. According to a prepared statement the company also plans to leverage AWS to "build new games" though none have been announced just yet. Fortnite has been using AWS since launch to support its ever-growing player base. It runs its worldwide game server fleet, backend platform systems, databases, and websites on AWS, and will leverage analytics and machine learning from Amazon as well to improve gameplay. 

"We’ve been developing our services on AWS since 2012. AWS has the broadest and deepest portfolio of services that allow us to stay focused on driving innovation in our products rather than the basic infrastructure needed to get or keep a service running. Their unmatched scalability has been instrumental in keeping pace with our rocketing player populations," said Chris Dyl, Director of Platform at Epic Games.

"We decided to go all-in using AWS because they enable us to offer a quality gaming experience to millions of gamers around the world, simultaneously. We are excited to work with AWS to expand our use of analytics, machine learning, and containerised applications using Kubernetes to make our sizable infrastructure even easier to maintain."

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