Using the Default Skin Gives You the Best FPS in Fortnite

A popular FPS booster said on Twitter that the default skin has the best edit delay and FPS.

And that certain skins and back bling could lower your FPS.

This made me curious.

Does the skin you use affect your FPS?

If this is true, then it would mean that skins do grant a competitive advantage because we know higher FPS makes you better at Fortnite.

So I did some tests in an empty Creative map using low settings and unlimited FPS.

I used FRAPS for taking the benchmarks so I could see the average FPS, 1% low FPS, and 0.1% low FPS. Each test was recorded 3 times to increase the reliability of the data.

The following skins were used for the tests:

• The default skin with no back bling and the default pickaxe – this is a barebones combination that would apparently give me the best FPS
• Snorkel Ops with the Deep Dive back bling and Tide Axes pickaxe – this is my main skin combination and I wanted to find out if using it was making my FPS lower
• Ice King with Fusion Orb back bling and Guiding Glow pickaxe – this is a fairly big and detailed skin with an animated back bling and pickaxe to test the lower FPS theory
• Stage 5 Calamity with Frozen Shroud back bling and Fusion Scythe pickaxe – this is a skin with animation effects and a bulky cape and a pickaxe with animations as another test for the lower FPS theory

Here’s a table of the results:

You can see that the default skin does get the highest average FPS.

And the Calamity skin combination had by far the lowest FPS. Using the Calamity skin combination made my average FPS drop by more than 140 in comparison to the default skin.

Also, the 1% low and 0.1% low FPS were significantly less.

These results honestly shocked me and I couldn’t believe them.

So I went and did the tests again.

But I had the same results each time.

Why does your skin affect your FPS?

The theory is that the FPS loss with certain skins may have something to do with the way animations are rendered with Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics System.

So skins with a lot of visuals could lower your FPS because there are more animations to render. But simple skins (like the default skin) can give you better FPS.

I was interested to find out what would happen to my FPS when using higher settings.

So I tested the default skin against the Calamity skin combination again. But this time using all Epic settings.

I knew that using higher settings would reduce my FPS, and I thought it would have a greater impact on the Calamity skin because of the animations.

Here are the results when the tests were run using Epic settings:

You can see that this time the average FPS, 1% low FPS, and 0.1% low FPS are almost the same. This was surprising and made me even more confused.

Why does using low settings have a greater impact on the FPS difference between skins than high settings?

Conclusion

The fact is that the skin you use in Fortnite can significantly affect your FPS and this discovery is still mindblowing to me.

I’ll admit, when I first saw the Tweet, I thought it was bait to get more impressions.

But it turns out that your skin choice in Fortnite really does matter more than for just aesthetic reasons or to create more space on your screen.

Now I don’t know if it’s the skins themselves, or if it’s the combination of back bling and pickaxe that is causing the change in FPS.

Unfortunately, there are literally millions of different outfit combinations and it would take me forever to test everything.

But we know for sure that using certain skin combinations can dramatically lower your FPS.

So the best thing you can do to protect your FPS is to only use basic skins, back bling, and pickaxes. If you want to be extra safe, then use the default skin with no back bling and the default pickaxe.

If you have a particular skin combination that you main, then I would suggest benchmarking it against the default skin in a Creative map like I’ve done in this post.

And if there’s no noticeable FPS decrease, then you can continue using your skin. But if there is a noticeable FPS difference, then maybe you should find a new skin.

I hope that Epic Games are aware of this problem and find a solution to this. It’s unacceptable that certain skin combinations can drop your FPS so drastically and put you at a disadvantage.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about this. I hope you’ve found this helpful and it makes you more carefully consider your skin choice in Fortnite.

If you want to learn other ways to improve your FPS, then read this guide to increasing your FPS in Fortnite now.