Epic details future Fortnite performance improvements as game passes 800K concurrent players

Earlier this week, Fortnite Battle Royale surpassed 800,000 concurrent players, which unfortunately led to server downtime and brought to light a number of issues. Matchmaking errors, client and server-side performance and packet loss have all been named as specific problems and fortunately, Epic Games is already working on tackling them.

Following on from Fortnite Battle Royale’s downtime on Monday, Epic created a post going over points of focus for performance improvements. Going forward, Epic will be focussing on improving performance on ‘min spec’ PC systems. Right now, Fornite BR’s minimum spec calls for a GTX 460, Radeon HD 5570 or even Intel HD 4000 graphics. From there, Epic will be moving on to fix GPU hands on PC and work with Intel, AMD and Nvidia to improve stability and performance via driver updates.

Here are the other fixes that Epic is working on:

• Improve input latency on consoles. Improvements shipped with v1.8 — please let us know your thoughts.
• Continue our push on improving console performance. We track the percentage of missed VSYNCs and want to be at less than 2% of frames (barely) missing it.
• Reduce hitches during gameplay. We define a hitch as a frame that took more than 60 ms, resulting in an entire frame to be skipped. The goal here is to get to less than one per minute with focus on entirely eliminating hitches over 100 ms.
• Fix remaining hitches on dedicated servers. E.g. a lot of players jumping late can result in rubber banding for players early on.
• Optimize server performance of common actions like taking damage.
• Identify source of hitches that are limited to first hour of releasing an update.
• Optimize our server and network code to allow sending of player state to all 100 connections per frame. Right now we are updating 25 connections per frame in the lobby and 50 during the game. That means your play experience isn’t where we want it to be till there are 50 players left. This is a major change that is running in parallel with other optimizations.
• Improve our handling of edge cases that can result in wells of despair.
• Improve our matchmaking system to dynamically route traffic to data centers within a region based on location.
• Continue our push on improving console performance. We track the percentage of missed VSYNCs and want to be at less than 2% of frames (barely) missing it.
• Reduce hitches during gameplay. We define a hitch as a frame that took more than 60 ms, resulting in an entire frame to be skipped. The goal here is to get to less than one per minute with focus on entirely eliminating hitches over 100 ms.
• Fix remaining hitches on dedicated servers. E.g. a lot of players jumping late can result in rubber banding for players early on.
• Optimize server performance of common actions like taking damage.
• Identify source of hitches that are limited to first hour of releasing an update.
• Optimize our server and network code to allow sending of player state to all 100 connections per frame. Right now we are updating 25 connections per frame in the lobby and 50 during the game. That means your play experience isn’t where we want it to be till there are 50 players left. This is a major change that is running in parallel with other optimizations.
• Improve our handling of edge cases that can result in wells of despair.
• Improve our matchmaking system to dynamically route traffic to data centers within a region based on location.

There’s no exact timeline for when all of these fixes will be in place but the list will likely be broken up into a number of patches.

KitGuru Says: I’ve yet to try out Fortnite, though it does look very fun. Do many of you currently play Fortnite Battle Royale? Have you encountered any issues?

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