After you've picked out a mouse to your liking (click here to see our Fortnite mouse guide which is based on what the pros use) you need to make sure that you didn't buy it for naught. A lot of gaming mice like to advertise that they can reach DPI settings higher than you can count, but that's really not that useful.

It's way more important that you're able to aim properly and having a high DPI setting isn't gonna help with that. Fortnite offers three different sensitivity settings, which means that there's plenty of ways to approach this whole sensitivity thing. That's great in theory, but it also means even more settings that you have to get comfortable with. That's where we come in.

Sensitivity is obviously very much a personal thing, but we've analyzed all of our Fortnite settings of the pros in order to get a baseline for you to use when choosing your own settings. You won't get anywhere by just straight up copying settings, but with this guide we hope to offer you a very solid base to build on for yourself.

Fortnite used to have your Y sensitivity (i.e. vertical sensitivity) be 70% of your X sensitivity (i.e. horizontal sensitivity) but an update in the summer of 2018 added the ability to choose your X and Y sensitivity yourself. A lot of pros tend to favor the consistent feeling of having their X and Y sensitivity set to the exact same value, but if you were fine with the old (pre-summer 2018) sensitivity settings you can always 'go back' to those by just having your Y sens be 70% of your X sens. Some pros like having their y sensitivity at a lower value to make it easier to track enemies horizontally, for example.

In games where you have to aim at moving targets accurately you don't want your overall sensitivity (eDPI) to be too high. If your sensitivity is too high it means you won't be able to do the necessary micro adjustments in order to successfully hit targets at a distance, for example. The reverse is also true though, have it too low and you'll be one pumped long before you've made the required five swipes over your mouse pad in order to turn around.

Since you're going to be doing a variety of things at your 'regular sensitivity' (building, looking around, aiming, ...) it makes sense to have this set to a sort of middle ground where you're comfortably able to quickly look wherever you need to look. Being able to respond to threats quickly is one of the greatest strengths of a good Fortnite player, but make sure that you're also able to respond properly. If you get attacked and you respond by making a really quick 720 degree turn after which you miss all of your shots you've got your sensitivity way too high.

In short: make sure that you can look around quickly and smoothly, but do take care that you can also aim precisely if you have to.

Your ADS (Aim Down Sights) sensitivity is going to be your primary sensitivity for medium to long range duels, so it makes sense to have this one set to something which allows you to aim properly without any jitters. If your regular sensitivity already allows you to do this then great; keep your ADS sensitivity at roughly the same as your normal sens. If you have your regular sens set to be a bit higher than what you're normally comfortable with for aiming then you should consider lowering your ADS sensitivity.

There is something to be said for having both settings be the same (so that it's easier to develop the muscle memory for quick flicks etc.) and the pros seem to agree with that, with 100% being the most popular option: around a quarter of Fortnite pros have their targeting sens set to that value. If you do want your ADS sens to be lower than your regular sensitivity you could also consider using 50% according to the professionals; that's the second most popular value.

Whatever you choose; we don't recommend having your sensitivity settings be too far apart. If you're going from a super high to a super low sensitivity (or the other way around) it's going to be more difficult to transition between ADS and hip fire.

Scope sens uses practically the same theory as the ADS sensitivity setting. You'll want to make sure that you're able to accurately hit that one pixel of your enemy that's showing, so make sure to set it so that one little breeze against your mouse doesn't make your scope flick towards the other side of the map.

Here it's important (again) to prioritize consistency over speed or ultra high eDPI. When you're looking through a scope for an extended period of time you're more than likely not going to be in a heated close quarters match, so it doesn't make sense to have this setting be too high. Make sure that you're able to hit what you want to hit and minimize the odds of you missing an easy shot. You can do that by not going overboard on the sensitivity. If your default sensitivity is on the higher side you can definitely opt to go for a lower scope sensitivity to balance it out.

On average the players seem to like a similar Scope eDPI to the ADS eDPI. This makes sense - you want to keep aiming consistent.

Fortnite, like most new PC games, can look very nice if you use maximum settings across the board, but that’s not something that we recommend if you want to be competitive. We have analyzed what the pros have been doing, as well as doing some ingame testing for ourselves and we came up with what we think is the optimal balance between having great performance while still having a pretty game to look at.

As with any reasonably fast paced game, it’s incredibly important to get enough FPS in order to smoothly follow all of the onscreen action. We try our best to make sure everyone can take something away from our guides, but if your machine can’t get over 60 FPS during gameplay you’ll need to think about upgrading if you want to be competitive.

The advantages of running a higher framerate can’t be denied (as you can see by the professional statistics) as you’ll get a much smoother image if you couple high framerates with a high refresh rate monitor, and you’ll have less input lag (regardless of what monitor you’re using) so it’s definitely worth it to get a good PC with a dedicated graphics card if you want to be competitive in the game, as that will definitely give you an edge when competing.

We’ve been hard at work analyzing the gaming PCs of professional players and have made a guide with the most popular graphics cards for Fortnite which you can read here. The conclusion is that you’ll need a powerful dedicated graphics card to get the best out of your game so feel free to take a look at our guide here if you’re interested. We’ve put a graph of the average expected frames per second (at 1080p) at high settings (so not max) for the top three graphics cards to the right so you know what to expect.

Prioritizing frame rates over visual fidelity is something that almost every professional player does because it reduces the overall system latency. To help gamers play at their best, NVIDIA recently introduced their Reflex Low Latency Technology. Considering the fact that Fortnite is one of the supported games and NVIDIA is by far the most used GPU in the pro scene we though it would be handy to add as small section on Reflex.

Reflex works in two ways: there's the Low Latency Mode, which reduces the render queue by keeping the GPU in sync with the CPU, resulting in reduced (you can go under 25ms, depending on your setup) system latency, and there's also the Reflex Latency Analyzer, which allows you to measure your system's overall latency as long as you have compatible gear.

This is some really interesting tech because it not only allows you to measure your overall system latency (which can help you identify bottlenecks) but it also reduces it, making for a more responsive game overall. If you want to play at the/your highest levels then small differences like these can really add up, so it pays off to know about this technology. You can read more about it in our article here.

Almost all Fortnite pros are on 1920x1080. There's a few playing at 1440p resolution, but that is in no way necessary and you'll need a pretty beastly rig to run the game well at that resolution. There are some with some strange custom resolutions, but those are more the exception than the norm, as you can see in the statistics to the right.

If your PC can run the game (and at least reach your monitor's native FPS) well enough feel free to turn the resolution up, but since frames are way more important for performance than pretty effects we do encourage everyone to stay at 1080p. You'll always sacrifice frames if you go for a higher resolution, so generally we don't recommend it for competitive gaming.