Fortnite on the ROG Ally: performance guide & best settings
As Fortnite has grown up, it’s turned into quite the graphically impressive title, thanks to Epic’s own Unreal Engine 5. You could certainly turn the graphical options down to their lowest settings for the highest possible framerate on the ROG Ally, and many people choose to do just that. But if you want something that looks a little bit nicer while still providing smooth gameplay, our “optimised” settings are a great alternative approach.
What framerate to expect in Fortnite on the ROG Ally
Fortnite has a number of useful options for customizing your experience, and every user’s preferred settings will be a little different. Ultra-competitive players may want to use Fortnite’s "Performance Mode" with graphical settings turned to their absolute minimum. With the Z1 Extreme in Turbo Mode, these settings can offer performance up to 120 FPS and and higher, depending on where you are in the map. This offers very minimalistic graphics, but gives you a leg up on the competition, especially since the ROG Ally has a 120Hz screen that’s capable of displaying all those frames. Or you can use these settings in conjunction with the Ally’s 15W operating mode, giving you a boost in battery life and performance in the 60-80 FPS range.
If you aren’t as competitive or want a nicer-looking experience, though, you can instead use our optimised settings that crank up some of the graphical flourishes while retaining solid performance. With the settings below, you can expect an average of around 60 frames per second once on the ground (again, give or take a few frames depending on the scene). Note, of course, your performance may also vary depending on drivers, software, changes in Fortnite’s engine, and other factors – including whether your Ally is plugged in.
Fortnite optimised graphics settings for the ROG Ally
If you’d like to strike a balance between fidelity and performance, here are the graphics settings we recommend for Fortnite on the ROG Ally:
- Resolution: 1920x1080, the native resolution of the ROG Ally’s display.
- Frame Rate Limit: Unlimited or 120 FPS. Any lower and you won’t get all the frames available to you. If you want a more consistent framerate, though, you can set this to 60.
- Rendering Mode: DirectX 12. In our testing, DirectX 12 provided better, more stable performance than DirectX 11. Again, competitive players can choose Fortnite's Performance Mode here instead, but if you're looking for optimised settings that balance performance and fidelity, DirectX 12 is the option you want.
- Quality Preset: Medium. While this option will read “Custom” once you’re done tweaking settings, many aspects of the world are inherited by which of these presets you start with. For 3D grass and other niceties, we recommend starting with a Medium preset before you tweak the settings below.
- Anti-Aliasing & Super Resolution: TSR Low. This setting renders the 3D Resolution at a lower percentage, then scales the image up using smart temporal algorithms. This determines the quality of the scaling, and while you can certainly go with "Native" and get good performance, we found Low produced excellent results on the Ally’s screen for a boost in framerate.
- Temporal Super Resolution: Quality. This determines the resolution from which TSR scales up to 1080p. The lower the 3D resolution, the more fidelity you sacrifice but the higher performance you’ll get. You can set this to fit your preferred performance target, but we think Quality is a good sweet spot for framerates around or above 60 FPS.
- Nanite Virtualized Geometry: Off. While there is some impressive stuff happening with Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite, it has a large performance cost, so we recommend leaving it off for the best framerates.
- Shadows: Medium. Shadows are a tough setting here. High shadows look noticeably better and more stable, but Medium shadows offer a sizeable performance boost over higher settings. We’re sticking with Medium for performance reasons, but you can turn this up to High if you want — just know you may need to adjust other settings or turn TSR to “Balanced” if you want to keep that 60 FPS framerate.
- Global Illumination: Ambient Occlusion. This helps add depth to the image with shadows around 3D objects, which you definitely want turned on to avoid a lifeless, flat-looking world.
- Reflections: Screen Space. This uses an effective, efficient form of reflections that shouldn’t affect performance too heavily.
- View Distance: Epic. This is somewhat personal preference, as there are competitive advantages to both lower and higher settings. Lower settings will get you a slightly higher framerate and let you see other players more clearly, while higher settings will let you see loot and player builds from further away. Since we can get a pretty clean 60 FPS with View Distance set to Epic, we’re going to recommend it here, but ultimately it’s up to you.
- Textures: Medium. In our testing, Medium provided a good balance of fidelity and performance.
- Effects: Low. This is a less important setting to overall fidelity, so Low offers a nice little boost in framerates.
- Post Processing: Low. Similar to the above, these effects are mostly stylistic, and Low provides good performance while looking just fine.
These settings provide a great-looking experience with solid performance, while still giving you plenty of room to tinker to hit the framerate you’re looking for. Use this as a starting point for your own preferred settings and get going. You don’t want the Battle Bus to leave without you.