The best settings to improve your FPS in Apex Legends

Though Apex Legends may not look graphically intensive from a distance, PCs start heating up once over 50 people begin to jump off from the plane. The maps of Apex are also more detailed than one would expect.

Even the strongest hardware in the market may struggle to keep up in terms of frames since there are too many elements to render in battle royale games. Professional players like ImperialHal with jacked-up PCs prefer keeping their settings at the lowest ratios to get stable frames and avoid drops during the most intense moments.

While you won’t be able to witness the true beauty of Apex’s maps, lowering your settings will also give you a competitive advantage over your opponents. You’ll be less distracted by the eye-candy details of the game while using your monitor’s refresh rate to its fullest and reacting faster.

We’ve tinkered around with the settings of Apex and gathered the following tweaks you can make to increase your FPS.

Video settings

Graphical adjustments through Apex’s settings always yield the most FPS per adjustment. Lowering most of the following settings takes some of the load off your GPU and allows it to produce higher frames while also keeping them more stable.

We also recommend turning off anything running in the background while gaming since keeping tabs or resource-hungry programs on may also steal away from your frames. 

• Display Mode: Full Screen
  • The full-screen display mode allows your system to only focus on rendering Apex and nothing else. In addition to trying to render your desktop and other tabs, windowed options introduce some input lag, which can be the plague of competitive games.
• Aspect Ratio: Native
• Resolution: Native
  • If your system is running on fumes and you’re desperate to squeeze out a couple more frames, you can consider lowering your resolution. This reduces the number of pixels to be rendered and increases the FPS by a nice margin. It comes at a cost of a more stretched viewing experience, however.

• Brightness:  This setting doesn’t have an impact on overall FPS, so go with whatever works for your eyes.
• Field of View: 90
  • Most pros prefer setting their field of view to 110 since it allows them to have a wider vision. This also increases the number of frames that need to be rendered and causes your FPS to struggle in return. Ninety FoV offers the best of both worlds but we recommend tinkering with it to either gain more FPS or to see how much more FoV your PC can handle while giving yourself a competitive advantage.
• Sprint View Shake: Minimal
  • Constant movement requires new objects to be rendered in or out. The shaking effect that occurs while running may give the game a realistic vibe but it also affects the performance a little by introducing an additional motion source. Keeping this setting at normal also makes it harder to stop enemies while running.
• V-Sync: Disabled
  • V-Sync doesn’t affect your frames but enabling it introduces input lag. In competitive games like Apex, even milliseconds can make a difference, so we recommend keeping V-Sync disabled.
• Adaptive Resolution FPS Target: 0
  • This setting has the best interest at heart for anyone looking to keep their FPS high. It does it in a disturbing way, however. The setting automatically reduces your rendering resolution while playing so you can play with your targeted FPS. While it technically increases your FPS, it makes playing Apex a lot less enjoyable due to constant adjustments and pastel-like graphics.
• Anti-aliasing: None
• Texture Streaming Budget: None
  • This setting sets the amount of VRAM Apex can use. Though it may be beneficial to cap it if you’re streaming, we recommend letting the game run freely to get the highest FPS possible.
• Texture Filtering: Anisotropic 2x
  • If you don’t have a decade old GPU in your gaming machine, this setting should have a minimal impact on your FPS. Having it on gives players a competitive advantage since it eliminates some of the blurs around the objects. But you can try turning it off as a last resort to gain more FPS.

• Ambient Occlusion Quality: Disabled
  • While you’ll clearly be able to tell the difference between having this setting on and off, we advise keeping it disabled to gain more FPS. The setting handles the light that reflects from or shines on the objects scattered around the map.
• Sun Shadow Coverage: Low
• Sun Shadow Detail: Low
• Spot Shadow Detail: Disabled
  • Though shadows tend to be helpful while locating enemies, Apex’s hectic nature makes it impossible to take advantage of them. Shadows are one of the more graphically-taxing settings, which doesn’t help their case, so we recommend keeping them disabled to gain more FPS.

• Model Detail: Low
• Effects Detail: Low
• Impact Marks: Disabled
• Ragdolls: Disabled
  • This setting adjusts how the character models behave after receiving fatal damage. Though it allows them to die rather realistically, it can cause some FPS drops if you’re taking down a squad.

Other methods to increase your FPS in Apex

If you have a top-of-the-line PC and still experience FPS drops, the issue may be related to something else. The first offenders are usually overheating or CPU/GPU bottlenecking. Fixing those usually requires replacing the problematic park in your rig. We recommend working with a professional if you aren’t handy with your tools.

Beyond that, the second lines of defense of the FPS problems are mostly driver issues and other software problems that are easier to fix compared to replacing your CPU.

Optimize your graphics card settings

Both AMD and Nvidia allow users to change how their graphics cards work while gaming. Players can make those adjustments through control panels accessible by right-clicking on an empty space on their desktop.

If you never made any changes in your graphics card’s control panel, you should check out written or visual performance guides for your GPU manufacturer, Nvidia or AMD. These guides should walk you through all the settings and help you adjust your graphics card for the best performance.

With the right settings, your GPU will start prioritizing performance over quality. The difference in the visuals doesn’t tend to be that noticeable, and the competitive edge you’ll have by having more frames will be more valuable.

Keep your graphics card drivers up to date

Every new Apex patch comes with new skins, balance changes, and sometimes a new character. Though it may not get a mention in the patch notes, the developers can also make adjustments to how the game interacts with your GPU. If these changes require a newer driver, you may notice some FPS drops.

Upgrading GPU drivers is an easy process for both NVIDIA and AMD card owners. After locating the suitable drivers for your hardware, the setup file handles the rest and the whole process usually takes about five minutes.

Run Origin and Apex Legends in administrative mode

While it’s a rarer case, user limitations that Windows enforces may cause Apex to struggle. This usually occurs in PCs supplied by schools and corporations that give their users limited rights.

The easy workaround to this problem is running both Origin and Apex in the administrative mode, which allows the game to run freely without any hiccups. If you can’t seem to change the shown settings, you may need to contact your device admin and ask for their help on the matter.

Remove Apex’s frame cap

Most of our guide was catered toward players who struggle to push their frames to Apex’s native cap, 144. If you have a PC that’s capable of going way beyond that, you can only get more frames by removing the FPS cap.

Apex doesn’t allow players to set a custom FPS limit within the game. You have to navigate to Origin and go to My Game Library. Right-click on Apex then select Game Properties. Go on to the Advanced Launch Options tab, type in “+fps_max unlimited,” and click Save. 

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