Fortnite for Android Beta launches with hefty requirements | Budget and Midrange Phone owners need not apply

[AlTech]

Epic Games, creators of Fornite and Unreal Engine, have launched Fortnite for Android Beta with seriously hefty requirements.

 

Fair warning, if you don't have a flagship device it is unlikely you will be able to play this game.

 

Epic is supporting a handful of flagships at launch and more will be supported down the line.

 

These are the phones they are supporting today:

Quote

• Samsung Galaxy: S7 / S7 Edge , S8 / S8+, S9 / S9+, Note 8, Note 9, Tab S3, Tab S4
• Google: Pixel / Pixel XL, Pixel 2 / Pixel 2 XL
• Asus: ROG Phone, Zenfone 4 Pro, 5Z, V
• Essential: PH-1
• Huawei: Honor 10, Honor Play, Mate 10 / Pro, Mate RS, Nova 3, P20 / Pro, V10
• LG: G5, G6, G7 ThinQ, V20, V30 / V30+
• Nokia 8
• OnePlus: 5 / 5T, 6
• Razer Phone
• Xiaomi: Blackshark, Mi 5 / 5S / 5S Plus, 6 / 6 Plus, Mi 8 / 8 Explorer / 8SE, Mi Mix, Mi Mix 2, Mi Mix 2S, Mi Note 2
• ZTE: Axon 7 / 7s, Axon M, Nubia / Z17 / Z17s, Nubia Z11

1

 

A few other flagships will be supported fairly soon:

Quote

• HTC: 10, U Ultra, U11 / U11+, U12+
• Lenovo: Moto Z / Z Droid, Moto Z2 Force
• Sony: Xperia: XZ/ XZs, XZ1, XZ2

 

 

Finally, if your phone is not part of the above lists and meets these requirements it should still be able to play the game:

Quote

• OS: 64-bit Android, 5.0 or higher
• RAM: 3GB or higher
• GPU: Adreno 530 or higher, Mali-G71 MP20, Mali-G72 MP12 or higher

 

Basically, users will need a Snapdragon 820 or better or equivalent. A flagship from 2016 or newer is basically required.

 

Also, Epic has stated that the game will not run on rooted devices. Of course, there are ways to get around this as some of you may know but to comply with Community Standards I can't post them.

 

Personally, I am very shocked that Budget and Midrange phones are not supported and that the requirements are so high. Epic clearly doesn't care about allowing the most people possible to play this game on Android since this is not how a developer who cares about supporting Android should develop their product.

 

At this point, one has to wonder how unoptimized the Android version is to have such a high GPU requirement so as to disqualify midrange phones.

 

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3296361/mobile/can-my-android-phone-play-fortnite.html

[kelvinhall05]

Time to whip out GLTools and spoof my GPU so I can try and run Fortnite on my Mi A1...

[soldier_ph]

It's nice to see that Fortnite has become one of the most popular games since it's release a year ago and to my taste I say it's definitely under the best Free to play games ever created. 

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

20 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Personally, I am very shocked that Budget and Midrange phones are not supported and that the requirements are so high

By now fortnite is the gold standard for BR, so it doesn't need to attract any more fanboys.

[NMS]

Good news, I guess.

Too bad I'm not a child anymore:/

[leadeater]

Can I play it on my Nokia 635?

[AlTech]

Just now, leadeater said:

Can I play it on my Nokia 635?

.

[QuantumBit]

9 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Lol pay more for inferior product... Epic

Are you referring to Android phones? I'm no fan of them myself, but I admit they're not "inferior" options.

No need to start a flame war

[Commodus]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Personally, I am very shocked that Budget and Midrange phones are not supported and that the requirements are so high. Epic clearly doesn't care about allowing the most people possible to play this game on Android since this is not how a developer who cares about supporting Android should develop their product.

I'm not shocked at all, since Fortnite is an intensive game for a phone and Epic likely wants to set baseline expectations for performance and visual quality. Think of it in the same way that you would the requirements for the latest shooter on PCs -- you wouldn't assume that a game like Far Cry 5 would run well (or at all) on Intel integrated graphics, would you? 

 

I suspect it's just that you're not used to stringent performance requirements on a phone.  Most mobile games are either 2D or purposefully watered-down 3D, so they're not taxing on most phones.  This?  This is a PC-quality 3D shooter stuffed into a phone.

[BuckGup]

Makes sense because they start with support from the iPhone SE and up

[Morgan Everett]

The requirements seems pretty reasonable to me, given the nature of the game. 

[Jito463]

1 hour ago, Commodus said:

I'm not shocked at all, since Fortnite is an intensive game for a phone and Epic likely wants to set baseline expectations for performance and visual quality. Think of it in the same way that you would the requirements for the latest shooter on PCs -- you wouldn't assume that a game like Far Cry 5 would run well (or at all) on Intel integrated graphics, would you? 

 

I suspect it's just that you're not used to stringent performance requirements on a phone.  Most mobile games are either 2D or purposefully watered-down 3D, so they're not taxing on most phones.  This?  This is a PC-quality 3D shooter stuffed into a phone.

Meanwhile, PUBG (which is horribly unoptimized on the PC) simply lists the following requirements for their mobile version:

Quote

PUBG mobile System Requirements

Android:

• Android 5.1.1 or later with minimum 2GB of RAM

 

[ignaloidas]

1 hour ago, Jito463 said:

Meanwhile, PUBG (which is horribly unoptimized on the PC) simply lists the following requirements for their mobile version:

Yet you have to understand that PUBG mobile is basically a different game by diff rent company, it's minimal graphics doesn't look good on event 480p. And I expect that Fortnite has started by using the same codebase they have for PC and then optimizing down the road. IIRC they even said they would have crossplay with PC.

[D13H4RD]

Wait.

 

OnePlus 5 and 5T plus 6 are supported.

 

But not the 3 and 3T???

[Jito463]

15 minutes ago, ignaloidas said:

And I expect that Fortnite has started by using the same codebase they have for PC

I find that highly dubious.  Porting between PC and consoles is relatively easy, given that the hardware in consoles is virtually the same as in a PC.  Porting from x86 code to ARM is not so simple, particularly when dealing with very complex code such as in a video game.  I'm not a programmer, so take my opinion for what it's worth, but it seems to me that it would require significant rewriting of the code to be compatible (depending, of course, on how many x86 specific features were utilized by the game).

[D13H4RD]

4 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

I find that highly dubious.  Porting between PC and consoles is relatively easy, given that the hardware in consoles is virtually the same as in a PC.  Porting from x86 code to ARM is not so simple, particularly when dealing with very complex code such as in a video game.  I'm not a programmer, so take my opinion for what it's worth, but it seems to me that it would require significant rewriting of the code to be compatible (depending, of course, on how many x86 specific features were utilized by the game).

The Unreal engine has a version made specifically for mobile platforms.

 

With that in mind, it's probably not that difficult

[DrMacintosh]

Meanwhile Fortnight on iOS can run on iPhones all the way back to the iPhone 6s and SE. Those phones are running SoCs from 2014 and they run the game well. Props to Apple for putting so much effort into CPU and graphics performance and making Metal to take advantage of all of that performance. 

[PlayStation 2]

now that's what I call a victory royale

[DrMacintosh]

3 hours ago, BuckGup said:

Makes sense because they start with support from the iPhone SE and up

2014 Apple SoCs vs 2016 Android SoCs. Really shows the performance leads Apple has carried over the years. 

[AlTech]

1 hour ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

Wait.

 

OnePlus 5 and 5T plus 6 are supported.

 

But not the 3 and 3T???

They meet the minimum requirements.

[AlTech]

53 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Meanwhile Fortnight on iOS can run on iPhones all the way back to the iPhone 6s and SE. Those phones are running SoCs from 2014 and they run the game well. Props to Apple for putting so much effort into CPU and graphics performance and making Metal to take advantage of all of that performance. 

*2015 but yes your point still stands.

[DrMacintosh]

29 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

*2015 but yes your point still stands.

Thanks Google, didn't understand the difference between "6" and "6s" Lol

[Bcat00]

Kinda high indeed, then again I'm not surprised.

 

everyone knows the bling lies with the whales using high end phones, not the cheap ones

 

given it some time, it will eventually come around in due time

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, DrMacintosh said:

2014 Apple SoCs vs 2016 Android SoCs. Really shows the performance leads Apple has carried over the years. 

I would argue more optimization. Apple makes it very easy for devs yet hard.

[PCGuy_5960]

7 hours ago, Jito463 said:

Meanwhile, PUBG (which is horribly unoptimized on the PC) simply lists the following requirements for their mobile version:

Completely different devs tho. PUBG Mobile is made by Tencent. PUBG on PC is made by Bluehole/PUBG Corp.