If you’re playing the hot new battle royale craze on PC, there’s a good chance you’ll need some help optimizing your settings for the best possible framerate and frametime. And even though it’s fairly easy for modern hardware to run the game around 30 FPS, shooters like this rely on having both a high average framerate and a really consistent and fast frametime. With that in mind, here’s a helpful guide to getting the best possible performance out of your rig in Apex Legends.
Apex Legends Minimum System Requirements
These are of course the minimum settings, so don’t expect to get 60 FPS with these specifications. I would honestly say that shooters shouldn’t be played with the minimum settings as the inconsistent framerate will lead to appreciably worse play.
- OS: 64-bit Windows 7
- CPU: Intel Core i3-6300 3.8GHz / AMD FX-4350 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Processor
- RAM: 6GB
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 / Radeon HD 7730
- GPU RAM: 1 GB
- HARD DRIVE: Minimum 22 GB of free space
Apex Legends Recommended System Requirements
These recommended requirements are meant to ensure you hit 60fps at the right settings.
- OS: 64-bit Windows 7
- CPU: Intel i5 3570K or equivalent
- RAM: 8GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290
- GPU RAM: 8GB
- HARD DRIVE: Minimum 22 GB of free space
Apex Legends Performance Recommendations
Optimize your overall gameplay experience for slightly lower resolution: This means you should turn down your resolution if you’re experiencing issues. This can really help improve your FPS if you just take a minor hit in graphical fidelity. Going down from 1440p to 1080p can offer a pretty big jump in FPS. And if you want to maximize your resolution beyond 1440p, say into 4K territory, you will need a much more beefy GPU than the recommended settings.
Make sure you’re not using an integrated GPU: Some Apex players are reporting that the game defaults to using integrated graphics when first booted. Make sure to force
Check your display mode: Some users are also reporting that Borderless Fullscreen modes cause server latency issues with Apex, try switching to a new mode if you can and see if that fixes any issues you’re having.
Adjust your FOV: This should be standard advice for any shooter. If you can deal with a larger FOV, and your system can handle the increased load, you should always widen your FOV to allow your peripheral vision to work more effectively in-game.
Here’s a list of how adjusting each setting can affect your performance:
- Texture Streaming Budget: Lowering from “Insane” to “None” can boost performance a bit
- Texture Filtering: Newer GPUs won’t see much of a bump here, but older hardware will get great gains by pushing this down
- Ambient Occlusion Quality: Disabling this will give a big boost, but at the cost of ambient lighting
- Sun Shadow Coverage: Shadows should be the first thing you tweak to boost FPS
- Sun Shadow Detail: See above
- Spot Shadow Detail: See above
- Volumetric Lighting: Bump this down to improve FPS by a slight amount
- Dynamic Spot Shadows: Not quite as important, only affecting specific scenes instead of overall performance.
- Model Detail: Low performance here will help, but may affect render times on enemies
- Effects Detail: Depends on each scenario, since it mostly affects combat visuals — though nothing significant.
- Impact Marks: No major impact with this one, since it controls something fairly limited anyway
- Ragdolls: TDisable to reduce load on older or low-end GPUs
If you want more guides for Apex Legends, we’ve got you covered. Check out our tips on bunnyhop healing to keep yourself in the fight. If you want a guide on revivals or finding the best loot, go here.
Apex Legends is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.