Latest Epic Games Whitepaper Discusses Reducing Fortnite’s Power Consumption

There is a new whitepaper published by Epic Games entitled “Reducing Fortnite’s Power Consumption.” It provides a detailed overview for optimizing Fortnite’s energy consumption on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. The suggested improvements can be implemented with very little development cost and minimal impact on player experience.

Many of the energy savings described in this paper can be achieved without your team having to write a single line of code – so there are big wins to be had with minimal time and effort required on your part. The paper also offers a deep dive into the methods, recommendations on improving the energy efficiency of your own games, and code snippets to get you started.

For this work, Epic Games focused primarily on reducing the game’s GPU load, since the GPU is a significant contributor to overall power consumption. The solutions presented required a small amount of game side C++ code. The team did not make any significant changes to the engine code beyond some minor bug fixes, which will be included in the upcoming 5.3 release. They focus on Unreal Engine, but these techniques are applicable to other engines, too. The intended audience for this paper is Software Engineers and Technical Artists.

One of the recommendations is linked to front-end development, specifically, inactivity-based energy saving. In Fortnite, players can spend a significant amount of time in the front-end screens, such as the Lobby and the Item Shop. The developers decided to implement a solution: if a player is in the front-end screens and hasn’t touched an input device for an extended period of time, we can reduce the resolution and/or frame rate without it being noticeable. 

The team shared that the surprising result of their work was that the implementation helped to save the energy equivalent of 14 wind turbines running for a year which can reduce the energy bills of players.

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