Apex Legends: Best settings for FPS boost (PC)
How to get buttery smooth frame rates in Apex Legends.
Our Apex Legends best settings guide contains a list of the best PC graphics settings you need to give you optimal FPS.
If there’s one way of gaining a real advantage over the opposition in Apex Legends, it’s improving your FPS. The faster you can play, the easier Apex will be. Of course, your mechanical ability and technique matter a huge amount, but if you’re looking for immediate changes you’ll have a tough time without a lot of practice.
It’s tempting to ignore the settings menu entirely and just go with whatever settings Apex Legends grants you when you boot the game up for the first time. Unfortunately, your survival chances can be ruined by poorly-optimised video settings bogging down your FPS. The last thing you want is to lose a shootout because your game stuttered all over the place.
Whether you’re new to Apex Legends or a seasoned veteran to the game, it’s well worth jumping into your menus and fixing it all up nicely. It’s the easiest and most immediate way to level up your gameplay, so read on for our simple guide on what to do.
Head on over to our Best mouse DPI and sensitivity guide if you want to improve your aim in Apex Legends.
Best PC settings for FPS boost
Here’s a rundown of every video setting in Apex Legends. Tweak these to get the best possible performance.
Make sure you consult our Apex Legends System Requirements page if you’re unsure whether your rig can run Apex Legends in the first place!
Settings
- Display Mode – Set this to Full Screen.
- Aspect Ratio – Set this to your native monitor resolution. It’s likely to be 16:9, 1080p.
- Resolution – Set this to your native monitor resolution.
- Field of View – This is personal preference. If you want to see more in general then set this to max, but if you want things a little closer, then tone it down somewhat. See what works best for you by tweaking it in-game.
- Color Blind Mode – Personal preference.
- V-Sync – Disable this to uncap your framerate.
- Adaptive Resolution FPS Target – Set this to 0.
- Adaptive Supersampling – This will be greyed out.
- Anti-Aliasing – Switch this off for maximum FPS. Keep it on for a slightly sharper looking experience which won’t tank your FPS.
- Texture Streaming Budget – This is effectively “Texture Resolution” and this depends on the power of your graphics card and the VRAM it comes equipped with. For pure FPS, we’d recommend switching this to a lower setting and not going any higher than Medium.
- Texture Filtering – This affects the sharpness of texture details which can hit FPS quite hard if you crank this up. We’d recommend keeping this at “Anisotropic 2X”.
- Ambient Occlusion Quality – Affects the quality of shadows and the like. This can heavily affect performance so set this to low. For powerful rigs, you can pop this on medium.
- Sun Shadow Coverage – Set this to low.
- Sun Shadow Detail – Set this to low.
- Spot Shadow Detail – Set this to low.
- Volumetric Lighting – Disable this as it can tank performance.
- Dynamic Spot Shadows – You get the gist, disable this.
- Model Detail – Set this to low or medium as it determines detail for objects and characters in the game world.
- Effects Detail – Determines the detail of explosions, ability effects and the like. Set this to low or medium too.
- Impact Marks – This controls how many bullet impact marks you’ll see in the game world. Set this to low or medium.
- Ragdolls – Affects the “flail” of a dead body. Set this to low or medium.
Remove FPS Cap
If you remove the FPS cap you’ll be able to get the absolute maximum number of frames from your rig.
Thankfully it’s not a super in-depth process. Here’s how to go about it:
- Open the Origin Launcher
- Select My Game Library
- Find Apex Legends and Right Click on it
- Select Game Properties
- Click Advanced Launch Options
- When you’re in Command line arguments, type in +fps_maxunlimited
- Click Save
- We’d recommend shutting Origin, then booting it up again, before heading into game. You will now be rocking an unlocked frame rate, beautiful stuff.
Essential Apex Legends Coverage
- Apex Legends: Guide – Our core guide to the game
- Apex Legends: Best Weapons – Every weapon’s stats examined
- Apex Legends: Map Guide – Getting to grips with the battleground
- Apex Legends: Best Loot Spots – How to gear up fast
- Apex Legends: Best Characters – An overview of every Legend
- Apex Legends: Abilities – Every passive, tactical and ultimate ability
- Apex Legends: Best FPS settings – How to get a performance boost on PC
- Apex Legends: Controls – Controls for playing on PC, PS4 or Xbox One
- Apex Legends: Battle Pass Guide – What’s coming with Season play
- Apex Legends: System Requirements – Specs to run the game on PC
- Apex Legends: Download / Install – How to get started on all platforms
Further Optimisation
Here we’ll list a few things you can do to further improve performance in Apex Legends. While these tweaks won’t net your enormous changes in FPS, they are still worth doing. Every little helps.
NVIDIA Settings
If you’ve got an NVIDIA graphics card there are a few extra steps you can take to improve your FPS in Apex Legends. Below we’ll take you through the process.
- Open NVIDIA Control Panel and navigate to “Manage 3D Settings”.
- Click on the “Program Settings” tab and find Apex Legends. If it’s not on the list, click “Add” and scroll down until you find it.
- Set “Maximum pre-rendered frames” to 1.
- Set “Monitor Technology” to “G-SYNC”. Note that this will only kick into gear if you’ve got a G-SYNC compatible monitor.
- Set “Multi-Display/Mixed GPU Acceleration” to “Single display performance mode”.
- Set “Power Management Mode” to “Prefer maximum performance”.
- Turn “Vertical Sync” off.
- Enable “Threaded Optimisation”.
- Set “Preferred Refresh Rate” to “Highest Available”.
Update your drivers
If you’re encountering a frustrating amount of stuttering, sometimes it can come down to out of date graphics drivers. It’s important to keep drivers up to date as it’ll ensure you get the best performance possible, or just keep your game running normally.
Both NVIDIA and AMD regularly update their drivers, so make sure you’re checking your Windows notification tab, GeForce Experience, AMD Crimson or their official websites just in case you’ve missed out on a crucial download!
Close your browser
Google Chrome is particularly guilty of this, but other browsers do it too. If you have a load of tabs open while trying to play, you can be tanking your performance for nothing – just close it! You can even save the tabs for later and access them via your History menu, so get rid of them. You weren’t going to get around to reading those 7 articles anyway.
It’s all about the RAM, so get rid of those unnecessary windows so your PC can channel that memory into Apex Legends!