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The amount of people repeating information on the internet that they heard is uncanny. I personally used an RX580 on Fortnite for about 6 months and had absolutely zero issues.

You come to learn that people, who have never owned an AMD gpu, and/or do not know the FIRST thing about optimizing their PC, are so quick to say silly things like "AMD Sux". It's a shame that ignorant people tend to be the most confident. Thanks for the video, as someone who has an NVIDIA GPU, I hope to see AMD do better in the future. We need competition in the market.

Anakin was NOT having it 😭 0:03

If I recall correctly, Fortnite does have a replay mode where you can test the same environment with different settings or GPUs, I remember seeing Daniel Owen's video about the RTX 3070 vs 4070 and he was using it to compare them.

9:38 -it is because of shader caching, basically it is compiling shaders ready to use in future games, after the shaders have been "cached", the game can use these precompiled shaders in future games which takes some load of the GPU, but they do need to be compiled every time there is a driver changed or a major game update.

Fortnite ain’t that bad with AMD; I occasionally play it at 1440p with the 6800. Just runs at a lower frame rate than expected

This was actually really interesting and helpful. Definitely a nice break from the usual pc building videos, good to see you stretching your technical commentary legs! I try not to play fortnite.... but when I did it was on a RX570 *with no issues*. Finally upgraded to a 6600 and I think a lot of these tips can apply to a lot of games out there. Looking forward to seeing you take on other popular games with this angle.

Thanks so much Zack, I could not figure out how to fix Fortnite lag after updating drivers, but now I know that just restarting the game fixes it. I think the bug is related to shader compilation though, and how UE just doesn't do a good job of throwing shaders to their own thread.

9:38 - this happens because the game has to compile shaders for the GPU again as you have updated to a new GPU driver

Zack, is it possible you could do more of these for other pvp games? I would love to see this for say, valorant, apex, tekken, LoL, OW2 just to name a few that I don't really have a personal gauge on for the best hardware choice, and I'd enjoy also seeing this for even CPU choices if you wanted to open it up to more than just team green and team red. I've been following you for a while now and I think you have some really great content that seems very down to earth with the more veteran side of PC building enthusiasts. It's great stuff and I think you deserve to hear this. Cheers ✌️

Finally! This was so needed! I also finally learned what DX12 Pro settings mean. It was practically impossible to find good material on Fortnit graphics settings before this video was made. I would also appreciate it if you could do a follow-up video on non-pro settings since I want both: Look decent and good enough perf. What kind of card is needed? Which settings are important? Again, thanks a lot for pulling this video together. You made the Fortnite community a big favor, in my opinion.

One of the reasons people use performance mode is because it reduces visual clutter, like removing grass, which significantly improves player visibility. Also, FWIW, when I had a 6800XT, the initial stuttering did happen after driver or game updates. You can reduce this on any card by pre-downloading streamed assets in your Fortnite Epic launcher settings. On that AMD card with the same PC, Fortnite crashed sometimes with a UE5 or driver timeout error. This was after multiple game and driver installs, DDU, etc. It didn't crash nearly as much as the 2080Ti I mained, or now my 4080. However, this could have been due to problems with the game itself and variance with stability on certain updates. I will add that driver timeouts in UE5 games are practically non-existent on my Nvidia cards, whereas I experienced them frequently on AMD, and so have some of my friends.

Hardware Unboxed have said multiple times the issue come when trying to get max gos possible for competive players. That AMD is worse when using performance mode. They say thats the way you would want to play the game. I dont play online shooters, but that's what Steve from HUB says.

Good video, but few things to consider that dx 12 is very experimental on fortnite and it has worse input delay then performance mode, you should really test those gpus in really intense build fights, there would be a really clear winner. Also dx12 has stability issues and more animations adding to the input delay it already has

You said the NV cards are horrible in the first game, after a driver update. I think it may be something to do with the shader compilation, but idk why it doesnt happen to amd.

Can you do a vid with performence mode instead of dx12 since the input delay is much lower compared dx12. Input delay is also really important since you have to build a lot and with dx12 the input delay is much higher making it really hard to build.

I need to be on performance mode, cause when you play tournaments and there are like 30ish people in a very small place, the game will be a mess with x12. For casual players it should be fine though.

Zack, we need the ultimate video editing pc guide.

love ur content, u taught me how to build PCs and I started a business in my skl :) tysm

I'd love to see these tests in stacked endgames where there is so much more demand on the gpu and cpu because of all the players and builds.

Anakin in the beginning kill me Off💀🤣🤣

Love your vids man, and could you do a Hyte Y60 build.

The view distance on enemies is 250 meters no matter what setting u use, it only changes the LOD of the textures from far away and that only gives u more fps drops, the only advantage that it gives is that u see floor loot from far away, which if u put more than medium view distance it doesnt increase so medium distance should be the best setting edit: i think people doesnt know that performance mode is made for low end devices, and that directx its just worse because its not the latest version of directx, its like the problems on counter strike, newer gpus werent able to get more fps than a 1050 because of csgo being a dx9 game, but now on cs2 with directx11 its way better for high end devices (and worse for low end ones)

I'm on 280hz monitor but i cap the frames a 240fps and i'm one of those people who notice even the differnce between 200 and 240fps. And for the past year i have been using an rx 5700xt for like 6 months with a r7 3700x which i swaped with a 5800x3D in august of 2023. All the chapter 4 was a mess: in mega city while dropping even with the 5800x3D, wich i bought exactly to push the gpu because in that cases with the 3700x the gpu was going under 20% of usage making 60 fps and even the 5800x3D changed nothing. When og season came back in november with the old graphic of chapter 1 i was getting 240fps IN EVERY PLACE!!!!! and the gpu was barely used at 20%!!!!!!!! When chapter 5 came i was getting the same fps as chapter 4 and in reckless railways i was getting 100+/-fps. for me is unplayable. At January of this year i sold my 5700xt and i bought a used rtx 3070 and now i have 240fps capped in every place of the map and this helped me a lot and in just 3 months i improoved a lot just for swapping the gpu. this is not to belittle amd GPUs which i really liked because of the software and in general i didn't have any specific issue and i've Always had a smooth experience but for fortnite (in dx11 and performance mode) amd GPUs are not good. In dx12 they are good because it is optimized for consoles and consoles use an amd GPU which is not a case in my opinion. One solution that i'm curious to try if i have an amd GPU is to use d3d11ond3d12 or whatever is called

Just a tip don't turn textures low if u r playing comp as u can't see through cracks on wooden builds so its much harder to track someone. Personally i would turn down 3d resolution to 70%-85% and make sure that shadows and post processing are off

Hi Zach ive been watching your videos ever since i bought my gaming pc but i am facing a issue in GTA 5. I am getting rough edges in it Should i use or not use MSAA?

thank you so much for this video i just bought my pc with the 7900 xtx but dont have it know it needs to build but so many people said i cant use the card bc its crashes or lags you the best thanks a lot

Usually competitive fortnite players use performance mode, that's the real competitive settings. The thing they meant is that some settings actually carry over from dx11/12 to performance (not graphics but some techical settings are hidden in performance but still apply)

I know you’ve probably told us all this before but what software do you use for your fps monitoring in the corner ?

This is a solid video! I've been struggling to find a balanced and non-hyped up approach to gpu performance in Fortnite. I really like your approach to solving this problem and I'm going to try out some of your ideas. Thanks

I’d recommend dx12 all lowest settings because in far you see stuff like long grass and have high meshes which could put more strain on your GPU

Ok but whenever I try switching back to DX12, even with the lowest possible settings on my RX 560 4gb, I go down from 107 to 80 fps, the game doesn't load correctly, and it drops way below 60 fps when it wouldn't in performance mode. Also, Fortnite is kind of CPU demanding as well from what I've tested with overclocking and stuff.

Big fan man and huge respect for you making this video but one thing kind of seemed wrong to me. Arnt all pros who actually play Fortnite competitively using performance mode? Does any pro play on dx 12? Am I missing something

that stuttering after installing drivers is the shader cache / pre loading shaders

Amd for the win!

Every tutorial always says "gO IntO pErfOrmAncE mOdE tO InstAntLy gEt 1000 fps!" but that's not true. On my AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, the two things that fixed stutters and low FPS were 1. DX12 rendering and 2. Uncapped FPS IN-GAME, and cap FPS in RTSS (this is important because I was getting tons of microstutters when setting an FPS cap in-game and setting it in RTSS (RivaTuner) fixed it. And if you want to remove grass in DX12, just set your view distance to low. Edit: I’m talking about casual non competitive players, I’m not an idiot and I understand how many people there are in an FNCS or cash cup endgame. If you’re a professional or competitive player, I understand that performance mode will help.

A really informative video. I would love to see these tests with PUBG. I get a lot of framedrops during my matches and I‘m still wondering if it has 🎉something to do with my RX6800 or my Ryzen 5600 isn’t strong enough… 1440p

Great video! I've really been hoping someone with competence would make a video about this! Keep it up!

Good video but there is some misinformation here! ⚠️ View distance doesn’t effect how far away you can see enemy players. It only effects textures and loot. You should keep this on low or medium unless your gpu usage is very low. Fortnite always runs worse the first few games after a game or driver update because the game works on a shader caching system. Fortnite downloads assets while in game and sends them to your disk. If your game is always stuttering you probably have some corrupted shaders your system can’t utilize. To fix this close the game then try deleting your directx shaders in the disk cleanup application on windows. Once you relaunch the game should stop stuttering. Fortnite players only claim AMD cards run worse in performance mode, not dx12. Most Reddit posts and guides advise AMD gpu players to use dx12 as you are doing. There is a main difference between performance mode and dx12. Unless you have all the graphical settings enabled DX12 is more strenuous on your cpu. It’s not uncommon to see cpu usage be around 90% to 100% while not using nearly as much gpu so you need to make sure your cpu is staying cool to avoid throttling. Performance mode should use much less cpu, and a little more gpu. But sometimes your usage can be too little. You can fix this by changing your system power settings to high performance and disabling unnecessary background tasks in task manager that are using cpu power and high system memory

I have a question for you Zach (and anyone else): I have a i3-10105f and had bought a 6700xt last year thinking that it would be the biggest upgrade ever coming from a gt1030 and I was wrong. My 1% lows suck, no matter what I do, whether I'm on DX12 with the lowest settings or performance mode, the game just doesn't run properly. I've tried everything from reinstalling the game to even completely reinstalling windows. What should I do?

Ive actually been wondering this lately. Alot of people are saying its bad but mine runs fine 🤷🏻‍♂️

Really good knowledge, still you forgot to factor a couple of nvidia things… for competitive players, Nvidia Reflex low latency is super efficient, and AMD does not have a true conterpart yet. Reflec also acts as a good in-game adaptative frame limiter, therefore removing some need to cap your frame rate but still getting the 1% low at a better level. Besodes,Nvenc encoder is very valuable to many people which needs to be accounted for in price to performance..

Really liked the video. Very useful and good info.

It's Lisa Su from Fortnite

First time running a game whatever be your GPU maker or after installing or updating the drivers will be a mess because of something called shaders compilations it's when the engine of the game is reading and communicating with the drivers to optimise their workflow some games like Call of duty will notify you about it but some others will keep doing it in the background and very specifically unreal engine based games (like fortnite in this instance) and Nvidia drivers tend to take more times, so I do not recommend to restart the game but let it sit for a moment (some games take up to 5min to compile) until it finishes that process and it will run smoothly

Hay zach is a ryzen 5 7500F and rx 6600 xt good for a 650 budget? Or is there room for improvement

Hey, A random question I know, but I need your help, I'm trying to make a gaming PC out of an old PC from Amazon but I'm facing a problem in understanding If it will be putting an RX 6400(GDDR6) in a PC that supports DDR4 RAM.....I'm really new to this stuff so I'm a bit lost

Hey Zach how do you get the info on the top left while you are gaming

bro honestly your such a valid man taking up your time for this

been waiting for this video.ty so much

i was interested in giving the DX12 a try on the pro settings since i run performance mode........it didnt turn out like your tests. i feel like fortnite specifically is very dependant on your nvidia control panel settings and maybe because i have mine tailored to run on performance mode that is why DX12 was bad for me. and when im on performance mode you can remove the DX12 shaders from being downloaded and that does help boost performance modes feel. so maybe i have optimized too much for performance mode to give DX12 a fair shot.

Whenever I turn on Lumen High and RTX, my eyes and fps start to hurt, I think the lighting in build fights makes it hard to focus.

Hi zach! for me, dx12 makes loading into a match take ages, i always load in when on the battle bus! could i have some help pls?

Hi, I'm thinking of getting a gamer pc with an i5 13600kf or 12600kf processor and a rtx 4070 TI Super graphics card to play at 4k. My first question is to confirm with you whether with this combo I'll eventually be able to play all the new and old games in all resolutions because I have a 4k TV that automatically adjusts the resolution according to the games I'm playing and I suppose we won't be able to play all the games in 4k, it depends. So I'd like to know if this combo works with all resolutions and all types of games, whether they're more cpu games, i.e. single-player games, or more gpu games, i.e. shooters. Then I'd like to know if, for example, you tell me that this combo works well, and if so, what is the ideal power supply that you'd recommend without it costing too much. Thank you in advance.

My nephew has been playing fortnite on his pre build that came with a rx6400 with no issues at 1080p, tsr quality, view distance high and everything else to low. I just recently upgraded him to a rx 6650xt I got on a clearance deal for 170$ at my local pc repair shop.

Hey zach i was gonna buy a msi gf63 thin wich has an i5 11th gen and the rtx 3050 , if you gave it please make a full review video its a really good budget laptop

what do u recomand for an intel lga 1155 socket pared with an nvidia 9600gt and 8gb os ddr3 1333 mhz ram with in an 400w psu

This is very good information. You can use this for other games as well and it is much better. Thanks Zach for the info 💯💯💯

can you do a peformance mode of this video for amd and nvida I was reading the support and amd has bugs rendering peformance mode vs nvida I aggree with you on running dx12 but in tournaments the fps significantly tanks on amd and nvida thats why people run peformance mode on all cards

directx shader cache might be why the first game thing happened, when updating drivers nvidia might default to deleting that cache

Can you pls test the input delay between dx12 and performance mode because mainly people avoid dx12 because of its high input delay and because fps is not everything when it comes to fortnite input delay is everything. Thx for the video though really clears everything up.

That NVidia stutter driver thing also happens after a game update.

i have a 7800xt, fortnite is my main game. it runs buttery smooth with dx12 high preset at 165 fps. i cap it at 165 fps to match my monitor refresh rate. it stutters sometimes in performance mode, not when fighting tho

4:22 you could use replays to test with almost no run to run variations. The explanations of 1% lows is not very accurate and when you, for instance, said the RTX 4070 struggles at higher settings, you didn't consider the usage at 60% due to heavy cpu bottleneck. Still, interesting topic

Did you try changing the settings to low on dx 12/11 then switch to performance mode? Cause if you don't that will affect your benchmark!

Fantastic video, Zach! I love that you have a good balance between educating the casuals and adding a pinch more for us enthusiasts.

Question did you put raytracing or however you spell on because Fortnite supports all of nvidia’s features like that

9:04 this also has happemed to me with amd gpus (but not that often recently) fortnite works weird but when you load it first time it starts to compile shaders, there is no warning or something to tell you about it, so the game goes laggy cause its working on that too

Hi zach! I am building a pc with ryzen 7 7800x3d and for a gpu Rx 6700 xt am I doing the right thing or should I buy anther gpu?

I loved this new type of video, keep it up!

12:02 there is no 90 FPS cap option, hopefully Fortnite's updated to have a customizable fps cap rather than a bunch of presets

for testing fortnite on different components consistently, you can play a game out, and then compare the performance with the replay system so they are consistent runs

Unreal Engine 5 has a shader compilation issue. I think Digital Foundry just made a video recently testing UE5 vs UE5.4 (latest version) and mentions this, or it's in one of their recent Unreal Engine videos. On top of that many other tech enthusiast websites and channels have mentioned this problem. The longer you play the game, the less stutters you get (with Nvidia and AMD I'm presuming) as less on-the-fly shader compilation is needed, once you've traversed everywhere for like an hour or so. I have both Nvidia and AMD recent cards, I might test this myself, but I don't play fortnite lol

Im using an amd 6750 xt and never had any problems running Fortnite except for one time where slurp barrels would nearly crash the game when broken but this Bug was also on Nvidia

i remember back in 2018 my friend had trouble to play fortnite bc of his AMD build, happy it has changed since then Also this video is really good from a performance perspective but I would like sometimes some stats about graphics for a certain fps (example people who play fight games at 60fps, how far can they push graphics)

are you saying for the most fps play direct x 12 with the settings you explained(I play competitive and i want the most fps)

The Nvidia driver issues I actually encountered with an AMD card specifically the RX7600, i just upgraded my gpu from nvidia and when i installed my AMD card and its drivers i got a total of 7fps in the lobby (yikes) but after a re-install of the amd drivers and a quick ddu for the Nvidia ones it was all good! Just a quick question tho.. after my new card was installed and i used ddu to remove the nvidia drivers i now encounter a really fast flickering issue on startup for about 1 min then its all good, any advice?

it used to be really bad in january for me ( i have a 6800 xt) there was a driver update in january that made it even worse but in febuary they more or less fixed it i can now run performance mode just fine on an amd card with 300 avg and 1% of around 180 the only time i drop under 140 is if there are 30+ people close together ( stacked endgame or spawn island) so not a gpu caused issue and i dont even have my fps capped

I own a Dell XPS 9100 and it's not performing well. I'm considering upgrading it as I cannot afford to build a new PC. I'm thinking of replacing the motherboard with an AMD AM4 motherboard. What upgrades should I consider?

Turning on "pre-download streamed assets" in the epic launcher fortnite options is huge, removed most of those unnecessary stutters. Makes the game a little bigger but makes it run so much smoother especially for lower end hardware. I used to play on a GT 1030 and made it much more playable.

Hey Zach when you were talking about the pro settings you know most Pros use performance mode

If you're up to, try capping the fps with riva tuner, its way more consistent than the game settings, that's something i noticed

far view distance doesnt affect the enemies. It only works on the items

the performance mode bug people are talking about with amd is probably the screen going blurry with every mouse movement its easily fixed by turning off radeon boost in the radeon software

did you download the compiled shaders for these tests?

when you install a new driver, and you open a game it takes some time to load shaders. thats why that happen 8:58 the solution is to play like that until it finishes the shader loading. you can tell from the 100% cpu usage that the shaders are loading

Hey zach. Do you think an i3 10105F and an RX 5700XT would be a good combo?

Should I use directx12 on the Rog Ally? (Z1 Extreme model)

My wife and daughter have been running 6600xt and 6650xt for over 2 years without too many issues(usually some hiccups at the beginning of a season or when a major change comes from AMD but for the most part very few issues

nice job! more longer videos like this!, please!.

I always play on performance mode with my rtx 2060 and ryzen 5 3600 on steady 144 fps with no issues and now i tested on directx12 on low settings and i cant play my cpu was over 90 degrees celsius wen i was joining a battle royale game and i did not join. How can did happen because you recommend directx12 over performance mode with low end pc?

Hey zach a questionwhat does the bios on the 7900 gre xfx do? i've got one myself but i found no info or reviews

Can you do a video on which underwear are good for gaming in?? I'm trying to improve my aim.....

9:40 It happens because game engine is building shaders, everytime new driver is installed "shader cache" is deleted and game needs to rebuild shaders. Its the same thing also on AMD. But after a couple games it gets sorted out, no need to restart Fortnite.

zach can you do a vid on Call of Duty. Always ger direct x error on amd gpu

the lag after updating drivers is the gpu cache

9:43 It happens because DirectX 12 needs to compile the map shaders. That's why your first 1-2 matches will have terrible fps drops

I got i7 4900mq and nvidia quadrok1100m, should i run performance (both from 2013 and ddr3 ram)

As a person who just built a gaming pc, this information is super helpful. especially since i have a amd gpu. Tankyou zac i love your content!