Why Some Fortnite Players Might Be At A Disadvantage

If you’ve been on the losing end of the majority of firefights in Fortnite, you might just need to get better at the game. Or, as it turns out, the way you’re playing the game might be putting you at a disadvantage. According to a new report, a faster frame rate could be giving some players an edge in Epic’s 100-player shooter.

The folks at Digital Foundry are known for putting video games through their paces, running oodles of tests and comparisons to figure out how technology has an impact on the games we like to play. When a possible issue pops up in a game as huge as Fortnite, it’s no surprise the group was quick to actually put various claims to the test.

When folks asked if frame rates in Fortnite had an impact on the actual gameplay, Digital Foundry set things up and ran a simple test. They set up a series of walls in the game and placed their character an equal distance away using three different setups. One has the game running at 300 FPS, the next has the game running at 60 FPS and the last has the game running at 30 FPS.

As you can see in the video, there doesn’t seem to be a difference between Fortnite running at 300 FPS and 60 FPS. Between 60 and 30, though, there’s a noticeable drop in rate of fire for the in-game gun.

This is further proven over time. As the first wall is destroyed in the video, the speed is slowed down to 25 percent so you can see that the collapse happens ever-so-slightly faster in the games running at a higher frame rate. As rounds continue to fire and walls continue to fall, the gap gets bigger. By the time the final wall falls in the faster setups, the player running at 30 FPS needs to fire about nine more bullets before their own wall collapses.

According to this research, that proves that the game’s frame rate indeed has an impact on the fire rate of guns or, more specifically, the difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS is an increase of 5.2 percent. The tweet notes that no other advantage is noticed outside of the faster fire rate and, yes, Epic has stated it plans on fixing this issue in an upcoming update. But still, it shows that players have been working at a distinct disadvantage when playing at a lower frame rate. In a game like Fortnite, where every bullet/moment can mean the difference between earning a Victory Royale, that’s actually a pretty big deal.

As noted in the comments, this has been an issue in other online games such as Warframe but since that game is primarily cooperative, it hasn't been as big a deal. Some other folks took this opportunity to humorously claim that this is clearly the reason they haven’t been winning their matches as well.