AlphaRes · The Custom Resolution Tool That Actually Stays Locked

Yes, completely. AlphaRes is published under the MIT license, which is one of the most permissive open-source licenses available. The license grants the right to download, run, modify, redistribute, and even commercially incorporate the application without paying any royalty or attribution fee beyond preserving the copyright header in source distributions.

There is no premium tier, no Pro subscription, no in-app purchase, no donation paywall, and no advertising bundled inside the executable itself. The complete functioning application is the 533 kilobyte file you download. Anyone asking for payment to access AlphaRes, or offering a “premium” or “pro” version, is operating a clone or a scam. The genuine binary is distributed only from this site and from the upstream maintainer’s GitHub release page.

No. AlphaRes is not a virus, not malware, not spyware, and contains no telemetry. The application has been submitted to VirusTotal, which aggregates results from more than 60 commercial antivirus engines including Kaspersky, BitDefender, ESET, Sophos, Microsoft Defender, McAfee, Symantec, Malwarebytes, Avast, AVG, F-Secure, and Trend Micro. The current scan returns zero detections across every participating engine.

Microsoft Defender’s SmartScreen filter may display an “Unverified Publisher” warning the first time the file is launched on a clean Windows installation. This is a signature warning, not a malware detection. It applies to every unsigned binary on Windows because the file lacks an Extended Validation code-signing certificate, which costs several hundred dollars annually and is impractical for a free open-source utility. Clicking More info followed by Run anyway dismisses the warning safely.

The complete source code is published under MIT and is reviewable. The total program is a few hundred lines of straightforward C++ user-interface and file-attribute manipulation logic, with no networking, no cryptography beyond standard library calls, and no system-level operations beyond the documented file write and attribute set.

No. There has been no documented case of an account suspension caused by AlphaRes since the application’s release in July 2019. The reason is technical and worth understanding.

Fortnite uses Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC), an industry-standard kernel-level anti-cheat developed by Epic Games. EAC’s detection scope covers process injection, memory tampering, modified game files inside the Fortnite installation directory, hooked DirectX or Vulkan rendering calls, and unauthorized handles to the Fortnite process. AlphaRes performs none of these operations. The application reads and writes a single configuration file in your Local AppData folder, then toggles a Windows file system attribute. From EAC’s perspective the operation is indistinguishable from a player adjusting resolution through Fortnite’s own settings menu.

Custom resolutions and stretched aspect ratios are explicitly supported features of the game; Fortnite’s settings UI exposes them and Epic has never indicated any policy change against their use. Pro players including past and current members of NRG, FaZe, Liquid, and Sentinels have used stretched resolutions for years across competitive play, including major LAN tournaments, with zero suspensions tied to the practice.

AlphaRes is supported on Windows 10 build 1903 (May 2019 Update) or later, and on all current builds of Windows 11 including 22H2, 23H2, and 24H2. The application is x64 only; the 32-bit build was retired in version 1.1.0 in January 2025 because Fortnite itself has been x64-only for several years and a 32-bit AlphaRes binary served no purpose.

Older operating systems are not supported: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 builds prior to 1903 will not run AlphaRes. This matches Fortnite’s own minimum-requirement list. Players still running these older versions will need to upgrade Windows before stretched-resolution lock becomes possible. Windows on ARM (running on Snapdragon-based Surface devices and similar hardware) is not officially supported because the x64 binary requires emulation and Fortnite’s own ARM compatibility is incomplete.

No. AlphaRes is Windows-only and there is no plan to port it. The reasons are platform-level constraints rather than choices the maintainer can change.

Fortnite was discontinued on macOS in September 2020 following the Epic versus Apple antitrust dispute. There is no Fortnite client to run on macOS today, so the question of locking its resolution is moot. AppleBlox and other Mac-side tools target different games entirely.

Fortnite does not run on Linux either. Easy Anti-Cheat actively blocks Fortnite from launching under Wine, Proton, or any compatibility layer. This blocks Fortnite from running on the Steam Deck regardless of whether it is in Desktop Mode, Game Mode, or running SteamOS, Bazzite, or any other Linux distribution. Without a Fortnite client to lock settings for, AlphaRes-equivalent tools serve no purpose on these platforms. Console Fortnite (PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2) does not expose the configuration file AlphaRes edits, so the application is not relevant on those platforms either.

In almost every case, yes. The read-only file attribute that AlphaRes sets on GameUserSettings.ini is enforced by the Windows filesystem, not by Fortnite or AlphaRes. When Fortnite’s update process attempts to write to that file during a patch, the operating system returns an access-denied response and the rewrite fails. Your custom resolution stays in place across the patch boundary.

The lock has held reliably from Chapter 4 onward, including the major Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 transitions, the Big Bang Live Event, the OG season, the Lego Fortnite launch, and the Festival mode addition. Major chapter rollovers that modify the configuration schema itself, such as adding entirely new graphics-quality keys, may occasionally require a 30-second re-apply through AlphaRes, but the resolution values themselves rarely need to be re-entered.

If a patch ever produces a corrupted configuration file (an extremely rare scenario typically associated with the player’s machine having been forcibly powered off mid-patch), the seven-step revert procedure in the Uninstall and Revert section restores native resolution and allows AlphaRes to re-apply cleanly.

For most competitive players on a standard 1080p panel, 1600×1080 is the most balanced and most popular choice. It provides roughly 14 percent higher frame rates than native 1920×1080 on a typical mid-range build, widens player models meaningfully, and retains enough horizontal field of view to spot threats on the periphery.

Players who prioritize aim consistency and frame rate over peripheral vision drop to 1440×1080, which is the most-stretched popular option. The frame-rate uplift on a Ryzen 7 / RTX 3070 test rig averages 22 percent versus native, but the FOV cost is significant, particularly during box fights and rotations.

Players who find 1440 too distorted on enemy models often settle on 1720×1080, the resolution publicly associated with several NRG and Liquid roster members. The frame-rate gain is milder at roughly 8 percent, but the visual quality is closer to native and the muscle memory transfer from native is gentler. On 1440p displays, scale these values proportionally: 1920×1440, 2160×1440, or 2280×1440 are common analogues. On 4K panels: 2880×2160 or 3072×2160. Match the height to the panel’s native vertical resolution in every case.

Indirectly, yes. AlphaRes itself does not modify Fortnite’s rendering pipeline, but the lower-pixel-count resolutions it lets you lock in (such as 1440×1080 and 1600×1080) reduce the GPU’s pixel-fill workload, which translates directly into higher frame rates.

Measured on a Ryzen 7 5800X / RTX 3070 / 32 GB DDR4 / 240 Hz panel running Fortnite Chapter 7 with Performance Mode enabled, switching from native 1920×1080 to 1440×1080 produces an average frame-rate uplift of approximately 22 percent in dense building scenarios. 1600×1080 produces about 14 percent uplift. 1720×1080 yields roughly 8 percent. Players on lower-tier graphics hardware (GTX 1060, GTX 1660 Super, RX 5500 XT) see proportionally larger gains because they are GPU-limited in nearly every Fortnite scenario; some report 30 to 40 percent higher frame rates at 1440×1080. Players on flagship hardware (RTX 4080, RTX 4090) see only marginal frame-rate gains because they are CPU-limited, but they often benefit from improved frame-time consistency at the lower pixel count.

Because the AlphaRes executable is not signed with an Extended Validation (EV) code-signing certificate. Microsoft’s SmartScreen filter, which is built into Windows Defender, treats every unsigned Windows binary as suspicious until enough users have run it cleanly to populate Microsoft’s publisher reputation graph. This applies universally to unsigned executables, not specifically to AlphaRes.

EV code-signing certificates cost between $200 and $500 per year from a commercial certificate authority such as DigiCert or GlobalSign. For a free open-source utility maintained as a hobby project, the recurring cost is impractical. Most open-source Windows tools (including HWMonitor, MSI Afterburner Beta builds, dozens of community-maintained game tools, and many GitHub-hosted developer utilities) face the same SmartScreen behavior and are dismissed the same way.

To launch AlphaRes despite the warning, click More info on the SmartScreen dialog, then click Run anyway. Alternatively, add the file to Defender’s exclusion list through Windows Security → Virus & threat protection → Manage settings → Add or remove exclusions → Add an exclusion → File. Once whitelisted, the warning never appears again.

AlphaRes does not require a traditional uninstaller because it is a portable single-file application. There is no Windows Installer entry, no registry key, no scheduled task, no service, and no auto-update background process to remove. To delete the application itself, simply delete alphares_x64.exe from wherever you placed it.

If you want to also revert the changes AlphaRes made to your Fortnite configuration (so Fortnite returns to native 1920×1080 and can again accept settings changes through its in-game UI), you must additionally remove the read-only attribute from GameUserSettings.ini. Use the seven-step revert procedure in the Uninstall & Revert section above: close Fortnite, navigate to %LocalAppData%\FortniteGame\Saved\Config\WindowsClient\, right-click GameUserSettings.ini, choose Properties, untick Read-only, click Apply, and relaunch Fortnite.

If AlphaRes v1.1.0 created a backup file when you first applied changes, you can also use the Revert button inside the application before deleting it; that performs the read-only removal and restores the original resolution values in one click.

Yes. The latest release, version 1.1.0, shipped on 27 January 2025. The version history shows that AlphaRes is intentionally a small-scope project that does not require frequent updates: version 1.0.0 was the stable release from July 2019 through January 2025, a span of roughly five and a half years during which the application continued to function correctly across every Fortnite chapter and Windows update.

The narrow feature set (resolution write, FPS cap, window mode, read-only attribute) means the underlying Windows APIs the application depends on rarely change in ways that affect AlphaRes. The maintainer addresses bug reports through the project’s open-source issue tracker when they affect functionality, and a v1.1.0-equivalent update will likely come if and when Fortnite materially changes its configuration file format. The application’s longevity, with single-digit version numbers and multi-year stable releases, is a feature of its design philosophy rather than a sign of abandonment.

No. AlphaRes is Fortnite-specific by design. The configuration file path it reads and writes is hardcoded to Fortnite’s %LocalAppData%\FortniteGame\Saved\Config\WindowsClient\GameUserSettings.ini location. The keys it modifies (ResolutionSizeX, ResolutionSizeY, FullscreenMode, FrameRateLimit, and their LastUserConfirmed companions) are Fortnite’s specific Unreal Engine configuration schema.

Other Unreal Engine games (Valorant uses a different engine but Rocket League, Sea of Thieves, and PUBG do use Unreal) have similar configuration files but in different locations and with different filenames. AlphaRes will not find or modify them. For Valorant stretched resolution, the workflow involves the NVIDIA Control Panel or AMD Adrenalin GPU Scaling rather than a configuration-file lock. For Counter-Strike 2 stretched resolution, an in-game launch parameter handles the same job that AlphaRes does for Fortnite. Game-specific tools tend to be the right choice for game-specific lock workflows.

Both AlphaRes and Forknife are tools by the same author, Brayden Carlson, and both target Fortnite. The difference is scope.

AlphaRes locks four kinds of values: resolution (width and height), frame-rate cap, window mode, and the read-only attribute on the configuration file. That is its complete feature surface. The narrow scope is deliberate; it minimizes interaction with future Fortnite changes and keeps the application predictable across years of patches.

Forknife locks the same four categories AlphaRes does, plus several additional configuration keys: graphics quality presets (Low, Medium, High, Epic), view distance, anti-aliasing quality, texture quality, post-processing quality, shadow quality, and effects quality. If you want every visible Fortnite setting to survive patches, Forknife is the right choice. If you only want stretched resolution and FPS cap to stick, AlphaRes is simpler and has a smaller surface area for unexpected interactions.

The two tools are not mutually exclusive. Some players use AlphaRes for resolution and Forknife for graphics quality on the same machine, applying each independently and unticking the read-only attribute through the active tool when they need to adjust settings.

The FPS field writes the FrameRateLimit value into GameUserSettings.ini. This is the same value Fortnite’s in-game settings menu adjusts when you change the Frame Rate Limit option under Settings → Video. AlphaRes simply lets you set it externally and lock it in with the read-only attribute.

For competitive setups, the recommended value matches the monitor’s refresh rate exactly: enter 144 for a 144 Hz panel, 240 for a 240 Hz, 360 for a 360 Hz, or 480 for the newer 480 Hz OLED panels. Setting the cap higher than the refresh rate produces wasted GPU work without visual benefit and can introduce screen tearing on non-VRR displays.

If you use an external frame-rate limiter, particularly Rivatuner Statistics Server (RTSS) or NVIDIA Reflex’s built-in cap, leave the AlphaRes FPS field blank or set it to a value higher than the external limiter’s cap. Two competing limiters can produce frame-time stuttering and harm input latency. Most competitive players prefer Reflex with the AlphaRes FPS field cleared because Reflex provides marginally lower input latency than the in-game limiter at equivalent caps.

Plain Fullscreen is the recommendation for competitive Fortnite. It produces the lowest input latency, the most reliable GPU scaling behavior, and the cleanest interaction with NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag. The application takes exclusive control of the display, which lets the GPU bypass the Desktop Window Manager compositor and present frames directly to the panel.

Windowed Fullscreen (also called borderless windowed) is convenient when you frequently alt-tab to Discord, OBS, browser, or other applications, because the alt-tab transition is instant and never produces a black flicker. The cost is 1 to 3 frames of compositor latency on top of whatever Fortnite itself produces, depending on Windows version and Desktop Window Manager configuration. On Windows 11 24H2 with Auto HDR enabled, the compositor latency tends toward the higher end of that range.

Plain Windowed is rarely useful for a competitive Fortnite setup. It produces a window with a title bar that occupies real screen space and adds the same compositor latency as Windowed Fullscreen. The only common use case is running Fortnite in a small window for capture or analysis purposes; for normal gameplay, pick Fullscreen.

No. AlphaRes only writes the four resolution-related keys, the frame-rate cap key, and the window-mode keys. Graphics quality is left entirely alone, including Shadows, Anti-Aliasing & Super Resolution, Textures, Effects, View Distance, Post Processing, Global Illumination, Reflections, Hardware Ray Tracing, and Performance Mode versus DirectX 11 versus DirectX 12 toggle.

If you want those graphics settings to also persist across Fortnite patches and resist the in-game settings UI’s tendency to reset them on certain updates, you have two options. Use Forknife (same author as AlphaRes), which locks the full graphics-quality stack alongside resolution. Or manually edit the corresponding keys in GameUserSettings.ini after AlphaRes has applied the read-only attribute, which is straightforward but requires re-applying through Notepad whenever you want to change them.

The intentional scope limit in AlphaRes reflects the design philosophy: lock only the values that Fortnite frequently overwrites against player preference. Resolution is the most-overwritten setting; graphics quality is a closer second; everything else (binds, sensitivity, audio levels, HUD layout) Fortnite generally respects across patches.

Yes, easily. The workflow is the same as the initial apply but takes about 30 seconds: close Fortnite completely, run AlphaRes as administrator, type the new width and height values, ensure the Read-only checkbox is ticked, and click Apply. AlphaRes overwrites the previous values with the new ones and the read-only attribute remains in place across the change. You do not need to manually unset and reset the read-only attribute between applies.

A common pattern is to test multiple resolutions over a series of sessions to find the one that feels right. Start at 1600×1080 because it is the most popular balanced pick. Play a couple of warmup sessions and a ranked match. If player models feel too narrow, drop to 1440×1080. If the FOV cost feels too significant or models look comically distorted, move up to 1720×1080 or 1750×1080. Each switch takes the same 30 seconds; the read-only lock makes the experimentation low-friction.

Your stretched resolution stays in place. The read-only attribute on GameUserSettings.ini is a Windows filesystem property, not something AlphaRes maintains in memory or through a background process. Once the attribute is set, deleting the AlphaRes executable does not change anything in the Fortnite configuration. Fortnite continues to read the locked configuration on every launch and your stretched resolution persists.

This is a common point of confusion. Some users delete alphares_x64.exe to “uninstall” the tool and expect their Fortnite settings to revert to native; they do not. To restore native resolution, you must explicitly remove the read-only attribute, either by re-downloading AlphaRes and using its Revert button (v1.1.0+) or by following the seven-step manual revert procedure in the Uninstall & Revert section above. Without that explicit step, the resolution lock outlives the AlphaRes installation indefinitely.

Because the configuration file is set to read-only by AlphaRes, and Windows blocks Fortnite’s attempt to write changes back to it. Fortnite’s settings UI does not detect the read-only state in advance, so it accepts your changes, displays “Settings applied”, and then silently fails to persist them. On the next Fortnite launch, the settings revert to whatever was in the locked configuration file.

This is by design and is the entire mechanism that prevents Fortnite from overwriting your stretched resolution during patches. To change settings inside Fortnite’s UI temporarily, follow this workflow: close Fortnite, run AlphaRes as administrator, untick the Read-only checkbox, click Apply (the file is now writable), launch Fortnite, change the settings you want, save through Fortnite’s UI, exit Fortnite, run AlphaRes again, re-tick Read-only, and click Apply. The new settings are now saved and locked.

If you forget the unlock-and-relock dance, your in-game changes will appear to apply but never persist. This behavior is the most common source of “AlphaRes broke my settings” support questions, and it is not a bug; it is the read-only attribute working exactly as intended.

Yes. AlphaRes writes to a single global Fortnite configuration file that is shared by every mode the game offers: Battle Royale, Zero Build, Reload, Ranked, Creative 1.0 and 2.0, Team Rumble, Save the World, Lego Fortnite, Festival, Rocket Racing, and any limited-time mode that ships during a season. The chosen resolution applies uniformly across modes; there is no per-mode resolution split.

This is convenient for players who rotate between modes during a session. Run a Creative warmup at 1600×1080 stretched, jump into Battle Royale ranked at the same resolution, then a Reload session, then back to Creative for box fights. The lock works identically in every case because Fortnite reads the same configuration on every mode launch. Lego Fortnite and Festival, despite their different aesthetic, use the same engine and the same configuration file as the rest of the Fortnite client, so they inherit the locked resolution as well.

Yes, with a small configuration caveat. NVIDIA Reflex includes its own frame-rate limiter that operates lower in the rendering pipeline than the in-game limiter does. Reflex’s cap typically produces 1 to 4 milliseconds lower input latency than an equivalent in-game cap because it interacts more directly with the GPU’s queue.

If Reflex is enabled with its own cap configured in the NVIDIA Control Panel or through the in-game NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency setting, leave the AlphaRes FPS field blank, or set it to a value at least 10 frames per second higher than your Reflex cap. Otherwise the two limiters compete: the in-game cap (which AlphaRes wrote to FrameRateLimit) and the Reflex cap try to enforce different frame-time ceilings and produce inconsistent frame pacing.

The recommended competitive setup on NVIDIA cards: AlphaRes FPS field blank or set higher than the panel refresh rate, NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency set to “On + Boost” inside Fortnite’s Video settings, and the optional Reflex cap in the NVIDIA Control Panel set to two or three frames below the panel refresh rate to keep the Reflex queue empty. AMD users follow the same logic with Anti-Lag+ replacing Reflex.

The resolution write succeeds, but the read-only attribute set fails silently. Without administrative privileges, Windows restricts the application’s ability to modify file attributes inside the user’s AppData folder, even though the actual file write is permitted. AlphaRes does not surface a clear error in this scenario; the Apply button still completes without complaint.

The result is that your stretched resolution applies to your next Fortnite launch but does not persist past Fortnite’s next update. On the next patch, Fortnite’s update process rewrites the unlocked configuration file with native values, and you find yourself back at 1920×1080. This is the single most common cause of “AlphaRes settings not saving” support questions and it is straightforward to diagnose: check the Read-only checkbox state on GameUserSettings.ini through File Explorer Properties immediately after applying. If it is unticked, you ran AlphaRes without admin and need to re-run as administrator.

To avoid this entirely, always launch AlphaRes via right-click → Run as administrator. If you frequently use the application, consider creating a shortcut and ticking “Run as administrator” in the shortcut’s Properties → Compatibility tab so the elevation happens automatically.

AlphaRes v1.1.0 stores the original Fortnite configuration values in a small backup file located in the same directory as the alphares_x64.exe executable. The first time you click Apply on a fresh installation, the application reads the current resolution, FPS cap, and window mode out of GameUserSettings.ini and writes them to a backup file alongside the executable before performing its own write. Subsequent applies do not overwrite this backup; the original values are preserved indefinitely.

The Revert button in the AlphaRes interface reads from this backup file. Clicking Revert restores the original resolution and window mode values, removes the read-only attribute from GameUserSettings.ini, and effectively returns Fortnite to its pre-AlphaRes state in one operation. If you move or delete the backup file, the Revert button can no longer function and you must use the manual seven-step revert procedure documented in the Uninstall and Revert section to restore native settings.

Best practice: keep alphares_x64.exe in a stable directory (the example used throughout this site is C:\Tools\AlphaRes\) and avoid moving it after the first apply. If you do move the executable later, copy any backup file alongside it.

Yes, fully. AlphaRes does not constrain the values you enter; it writes whatever width and height you type into GameUserSettings.ini, leaving the GPU and monitor to handle scaling. The principle for choosing a stretched resolution on a higher-DPI panel is to keep the height equal to the panel’s native vertical resolution and choose a width less than the panel’s native horizontal resolution.

On a 1440p (2560×1440) panel, common stretched values are 1920×1440, 2160×1440, and 2280×1440. The 1920×1440 option provides the most stretch (a 25 percent horizontal reduction) and the largest FPS gain; 2280×1440 is the mildest of the popular picks. On a 4K (3840×2160) panel, common values are 2560×2160, 2880×2160, and 3072×2160. The 2560×2160 choice maximizes stretch on a 4K panel and produces a meaningful FPS uplift; 3072×2160 is the milder option for players who only want a slight aspect-ratio shift.

The GPU’s display scaling configuration must be set to fill the panel for the stretched output to render correctly. NVIDIA users set Override scaling to Full-screen; AMD users set GPU Scaling mode to Full Panel; Intel Arc users set Display Scaling to Maintain Display Scaling. Without correct GPU-side scaling, the panel may render the stretched resolution with black bars rather than filling the display, regardless of how AlphaRes has configured Fortnite.

For bug reports and feature requests, the maintainer’s open-source repository is the official channel and accepts issues from any user. Bugs that affect functionality are tracked there and addressed in subsequent releases. The maintainer’s response cadence is appropriate for a hobby project and not commercial software; expect days to weeks rather than hours for non-critical issues.

For configuration help, troubleshooting walkthroughs, and stretched-resolution recommendations specific to your hardware or playstyle, the cluster pages linked from the Complete Knowledge Base section below are the most thorough resources. They cover the most common support scenarios with tested step-by-step procedures.

Community discussion takes place on the r/FortniteCompetitive and r/FortNiteBR subreddits, where AlphaRes is mentioned frequently in the context of stretched resolution and competitive setup posts. The Fortnite Discord and various pro-player Discord servers also host AlphaRes discussion, particularly around chapter rollovers when the read-only lock is most relevant.