OnePlus x Fortnite: 90fps Performance Review

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Not long after Epic Games announced that it will be releasing Fortnite on the Google Play Store, the company forged a partnership with OnePlus, wherein the latest OnePlus 8 series phones were to be the first smartphones to run the incredibly popular battle royale title at 90fps.

Fortnite on mobile ran at only 30fps when it first launched on Android back in 2018. Later in 2019, the game was updated to support 60fps but only on select Samsung devices. That has been the case since, with Samsung having the only Android phones that can run Fortnite in 60fps, with all other Android phones being limited to 30fps.


Epic Games now has another partnership, this time with OnePlus, to make the 90fps mode available exclusively on the OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus 8 Pro. This is a huge deal when you consider almost every other Android phone can only run this game at 30fps and how much of an impact frame rate has on gameplay. So we decided to run the game on both these devices and see how it performs.

The first thing that you may have noticed is that the game is 90fps on both, the OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus 8 Pro. This is despite the latter having a 120Hz refresh rate display, which in this case has no additional benefit over the 90Hz OnePlus 8.

OnePlus has made it easier for its customers to get Fortnite with the latest update on both these phone. The game will automatically show up as a tile inside the Game Space app and from there it's a 7GB download. That's a bit hefty for a mobile game but unlike something like, say, PUBG, Fortnite does have almost all of its assets in this 7GB download, and you don't need to download anything else after this.

Heading over to the graphics settings, the first thing you'll see at the top is the frame rate option. While most other devices here will show 20fps and 30fps, with some Samsung phones also showing 45fps and 60fps, the OnePlus 8 devices will also show 90fps option along with all the aforementioned ones.


Now here's the important part; selecting the 90fps option will set the quality preset to the lowest setting. This is the only quality setting available at this frame rate. If you increase the quality setting, you will immediately drop down to 60fps. You can have 60fps as your frame rate up to the Epic quality preset but 90fps is locked to Low.

The other relevant option here is the slider called 3D Resolution, which sets the internal rendering resolution of the game. Normally, when this is set to 100%, the game renders internally at the same resolution as the display. Here, it's a bit misleading, as the maximum internal rendering resolution of the game is lower than the display's resolution, so even with 100% scaling, you aren't getting 1080p on the OnePlus 8 or 1440p on the OnePlus 8 Pro. So we recommend keeping this at 100% at all times or things can look rough. We'll take a look at this setting more later.


One of the good things about Fortnite is that it has an internal frame rate counter, so it will show you the current frame rate that the game is running at on the top edge of the screen if you enable the option from the settings. We are going to use this tool to illustrate the frame rate going forward in all the following screenshots. The frame rate always appears on the top right edge of the display, except on the main menu of the game, where it's at the bottom left corner.

Let's move on to the actual performance now. The testing was done on both, the OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus 8 Pro, and the observations here apply to both unless specified otherwise. Our devices were set to 90fps with 100% render scale and locked to Low preset. The Fnatic Mode was also engaged on both devices.

First of all, the game's frame rate is locked to 30fps when you're in the opening menu. It also seems to be locked to higher quality and render scale so not much of the options in the Settings menu seem to apply here. So the main menu screen should not be considered in any quality or performance analysis.


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