Fortnite experiences frequent lag on my mid-range gaming PC.
Fortnite experiences frequent lag on my mid-range gaming PC.
You've recently reinstalled Fortnite after a long wait, but it's proving very difficult to play smoothly. When new content loads, the game freezes heavily. Your system specs include an i5-12600k, RX 7800xt, 16GB DDR4 3200MHz, Corsair TX750M PSU, and a Crucial P2 SSD with 1TB. It seems RAM usage is around 15.5GB, which might be the issue. Fortnite previously ran well on your older 1060 machine with just 8GB RAM in 2018. When you have no load, it runs at around 100fps with ray tracing and high settings, but the stutters are really bothersome. If upgrading to 32GB isn't an option, what other solutions could help?
RAM consumption at 15.5 GB seems unusual. It’s likely not Fortnite’s usage since recommended limits are around 16 GB or more, and it should typically use only 5-8 GB. Check the task manager to confirm what’s actually running.
Windows consumes roughly half of my memory when idle and no tasks are active. I've also observed the game performs very poorly at around 3 frames per second during startup, with increasing RAM usage worsening the issue.
Windows aims to utilize all available RAM during gameplay, though it merely reserves it. You can still perform multiple tasks smoothly, even if the experience isn’t perfect. If you haven’t seen any footage of Fortnite without performance issues, it often stutters, especially on high-end systems—typically maintaining around 200 to 50 frames per second. It doesn’t seem like your hardware is the problem; consider running a Firestrike benchmark (available on Steam) and sharing the results here for verification. Usually, minor shader cache updates improve performance over time.