Fortnite is getting a graphics upgrade

Epic Games has announced that Fortnite is receiving a significant graphics overhaul as part of the game's 17.00 update, which kicks off season 7 on June 8.

Fortnite already looks good on PC: Its adaptable art style conforms to whatever the ever-growing multiverse of marketing crossovers throws at it, and coming from the creators of the Unreal Engine, it runs fast with industry-standard rendering features.

There was room for an upgrade, though: Epic says that if you play on the "Epic" graphics quality preset, both battle royale and creative mode will feature better storm and cloud effects. Smoke and liquid simulations are also being modified, which is supposed to result in better car explosions, better looking lakes and Slurp juice, and my personal most-anticipated update, better fire effects for when you inevitably hit a house with a flaming arrow or firefly jar.

Epic says it's also adding improved postprocessing features for lens flare, bloom, and shadow quality.

So what will it all cost you in terms of hardware? Here are the new PC specs for the "Epic" graphics setting:

• Nvidia GTX 1080, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, or equivalent GPU
• 4 GB VRAM or higher
• Intel Core i7-8700, AMD Ryzen 7 3700x, or equivalent
• 16 GB RAM or higher
• NVMe Solid State Drive
• Windows 10 64-bit

Fortnite's recommended settings stay the same, though:

• Nvidia GTX 960, AMD R9 280, or equivalent DX11 GPU
• 2 GB VRAM
• Core i5-7300U 3.5 GHz
• 8 GB RAM
• Windows 10 64-bit

And if you're working on the lower end of hardware, Fortnite's medium, low, and performance rendering mode alpha settings are remaining the same.

Here's minimum specs as a refresher:

• Intel HD 4000 on PC; Intel Iris Pro 5200
• Core i3-3225 3.3 GHz
• 4 GB RAM
• Windows 7/8/10 64-bit

Epic says that "High" settings will become the equivalent of pre-17.00 "Epic" settings once it all goes live.

Other updates include: The recommended GPU will become Nvidia GTX 960, AMD R9 280, or equivalent DX11 GPU. Epic is also changing the recommended OS to Windows 10 64-bit, but players still using Windows 7 64-bit and Windows 8 64-bit can still run Fortnite fine.

Fortnite season 7 is coming up soon on June 8. We'll need all the lighting effects we can get when alien UFOs start abducting more players.