Fortnite Stretched Resolution Guide

Fortnite is a game, unlike many others, that benefits from lowering your resolution. And, at first thought or glance, you may ask yourself why and how? Well, There’s a thing called FOV. FOV stands for Field-of-View. When you lower your resolution, it reduces the amount of pixels on your screen hence stretching it. With the stretch, your field of view is actually increased because the game has to make up for the missing pixels. This actually creates a slight advantage for users on stretched resolutions, albeit small. It does have a few cons, though, so let’s take a bit of a deeper look to see if the choice is right for you.

Stretched Resolution Differences

You’re going to notice in the right picture, the difference between four different solutions. If you notice in the top left, top right, and bottom left pictures, the electrical tower. You’re going to notice how much more space there is between the top of the tower, and the top of the screenshot in comparison to the bottom right (1920x1080p). This is the FOV increase we have mentioned. In conjunction with less input lag (the game actually feels more responsive), and higher frames, is the reason behind most Fortnite professional players running native resolution. At first glance, stretched is incredibly ugly, but it quickly grows on you. It makes the game look like it is actually being played faster, and that in itself can get someone’s blood pumping to the point where they’re just on fire. Placebo or not, it is certainly making a difference in a player’s game.

That brings us to the next point. Why doesn’t everyone run stretched resolution if it’s so beneficial? Well, it is slightly ugly. If you’re one that is super into graphics, cartoon-y or not, you’re not going to want to play on stretched. Missing pixels, means it is going to be less sharp, and slightly blurry. Even a game with Fortnite’s graphics is quite beautiful on the native resolution. You’ll notice a lot of people complaining about some of the pro Fortnite player’s twitch quality. This is directly related to them playing with stretched. Outside of the lower graphics, though, there isn’t really any other cons. So, if you’re someone that can get over the lack of graphics, you’re going to love stretched resolution. I come from a CS:GO background so running stretched resolution is pretty normal to me, and it doesn’t bother me anymore graphically.

Some people are going to tell you it makes hitboxes larger. It doesn’t, they just look like they’re larger because of the stretching. There’s no real gain through stretched res in terms of hitboxes. If you’re noticing an immediate gain, it is likely placebo, or a benefit from increased frames, higher FOV, less input lag.

Stretched Resolution Steps

1 – Go to the start menu, in the bottom left on your desktop. Click it, select the search box so that it begins blinking, and type in “Run”. From there, this screen will pop.

2 – Into the “Run” box that pops up, type %appdata%.

3 – This is going to take you to “C:\Users\(YOUR-USER)\AppData\Roaming”. From here, go up one folder to AppData.

4 – Double click Local. Find FortniteGame within that, double click it. Double click Saved. Double click Config. Double click Windows Client. Now, you should be at “C:\Users\(YOUR-USER)\AppData\Local\FortniteGame\Saved\Config\WindowsClient” with GameUserSettings.ini showing in the folder.

5- Right click GameUserSettings.ini -> properties. Make sure the “read-only” box is un-checked. Note: You’re going to need to enable this after you change it, so keep this in mind.

6 – Right click GameUserSettings.ini -> Edit.

7 – Notice the red arrows in the image. You will want to change these to your desired resolution. File -> Save. Go back into properties on GameUserSettings.ini, and check the read-only box. This will ensure that your settings aren’t overwritten.

8 – Open up your Nvidia Control Panel (right click on desktop -> nvidia control panel)

9 – Under Display, select “change resolution”.

10 – Click on “Customize” within the change resolution tab. This will bring up the below window.

11 – Click Create Custom Resolution. Enter your desired resolution, hit test and then apply. Make sure you check the box of the custom resolution after you’ve created it.

12 – Go to “Adjust Desktop Size and Position”. Make sure Full-screen is selected, perform scaling on is “GPU” and the override the scaling mode set by games and programs box is checked.