PC components have become increasing hard to find during the coronavirus pandemic, and those new graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD? Well, good luck with that. But Fortnite players need not worry, Epic Games just made the game run much faster on older hardware.
The Fortnite Team announced that a new Performance Mode has been added to the game on all PCs that meet the minimum spec. For now, it's available in Alpha and can be turned on in the Rendering Mode section of the game's settings. You'll see three options available: DirectX 11, DirectX 12 (Beta), and the new Performance (Alpha).
It only works with Battle Royale and Creative mode, and if Fortnite detects your PC spec is on the low end it will suggest enabling it. Otherwise, this remains an opt-in feature, but what exactly does it do to improve the game? The team explains that it "offers significant performance gains by trading out visual quality to lower memory usage and lighten the load on CPU and GPU." So players are effectively trading visual quality for speed and a more consistent/higher framerate.
Epic offers two examples of the possible performance improvement, which you can see in the table above. Based on this evidence, Performance Mode is definitely a big improvement.
A side effect of enabling Performance Mode is Fortnite downloads can be smaller. With it turned on, you can opt-out of high resolution textures for the game, meaning the Epic Games Launcher doesn't need to download them. To opt-out, locate Fortnite in your Epic Games Launcher library, select Options, and untick the High Resolution Textures box.