The battle-royale genre continues to evolve, and out of the blue, we got a new battle royale game available. That also is absolutely free to play!
We’ve been looking at what the most competitive and professional players use as their settings.
This essential performance guide for Apex Legends where we’ve tried every single aspect on how to optimize your settings, improving FPS (the easiest way is with the CPUCores software) for the best competitive settings.
There many things to do regarding getting a good and stable FPS count. If you’re curious about what other professional players are using as their settings, check out our Apex Legends Pro Settings comparison guide.
Without further ado, let’s dive in!
How to Optimize your Settings in Apex Legends
Regardless if you play Apex Legends on PC or a laptop, the easiest way to boost performance is to start with the in-game settings.
You’ll find the settings while in game pressing ESC and go to ‘settings’. Apart from actual hardware in your computer, the graphics settings have the most impact on your FPS while gaming.
First, you have to decide if you are a competitive gamer who wants every single frame possible or if you want the game to have beautiful graphics.
You see, most hardcore gamers would essentially give up any graphic on high or disabling every possible effect, even though their computer can handle it easily.
Their only goal is to minimize lag, whatever it takes.
In battle royale games, this can be significant for your overall performance.
Think about it, if you meet a player who hasn’t optimized their settings and you have. You would much easier handle the situation lag-free, and if you have a high refreshment gaming monitor, you surely want to hit these amount of frames to get full advantage of your monitor.
These are the Best Settings for Apex Legends that gives a great FPS boost:
| Settings | Input |
|---|---|
| Display Mode | Full Screen |
| Aspect Ratio | Native |
| Resolution | Native |
| Field of View | 90 |
| V-Sync | Disabled |
| Anti-Aliasing | None |
| Texture Streaming Budget | High |
| Texture Filtering | Anisotropic 4X |
| Ambient Occlusion Quality | Disabled |
| Sun Shadow Coverage | Low |
| Sun Shadow Detail | Low |
| Spot Shadow Detail | Disable |
| Volumetric Lighting | Disable |
| Dynamic Spot Shadows | Disable |
| Model Detail | Low |
| Effects Detail | Low |
| Impact Marks | Low |
| Ragdolls | Low |
Display Mode
Some use windowed full-screen mode for faster tabbing out and in of the game. Don’t do that! Use Fullscreen only, this will greatly increase the performance as your computer will have an easier time handling the game.
Aspect Ratio
The ratio of the height and width of the screen, the default is set to (native) which will give you the aspect ratio of your monitor. Recommended to leave it like that.
Either way, this is an individual choice depending on your hardware or liking, most commonly 16:10 or 16:9. Also, it’s not that uncommon that competitive gamers prefer the nowadays old-school 4:3 ratio, black bars or stretched resolution.
Resolution
10% FPS Boost
Depending on your graphics card and monitor, the resolution should be your native. More than half of the PC players use 1920×1080.
However, if your computer has a hard time to keep up with decent FPS rates. Lowering display resolution is probably the one setting that will improve performance the most. Reducing the resolution will result in a less sharp and more pixelated image, but you will gain more frames per second.
Field of View
Field of View, or often referred to as FOV is the horizontal view angle of the game. As you might suspect the higher FOV, the more you’ll see from left to right. We would recommend setting 90 in FOV here for competitive gamers.
Regarding performance, FOV (Field of View) also has an impact. Widening your view will make the game have to render more assets. Resulting in costing more resources of your computer.
Also, having to wide FOV can make it harder to have focus on what’s most important, your crosshair.
V-Sync
Set vertical sync to disabled as it will cap your FPS to your monitor’s refresh rate. Besides, it can also increase input lag, and you don’t want that.
If you experience screen tearing, you should instead use NVIDIA’s adaptive VSync to lock the frame rates in sync.
Anti-Aliasing
3% FPS Boost
Next to resolution, are anti-aliasing quality the one setting that impact the visual image the most, which also will gain you more FPS.
Recommended setting to None for stable frame rates. It will give slightly edges in-game or a ‘jagged’ and sharp look, anti-aliasing will help you smooth out the graphics but can cost performance at high sample rates. Selecting none will give a boost in performance.
Texture Streaming Budget
5-6% FPS Boost
This settings is regarding the quality of the texture and texture resolution. If you want maximum amount of performance choose None, but recommended to go for High (4GB VRAM) as spotting enemies will be easier visually. Find a sweet-spot for your setup.
Texture Filtering
5-6% FPS Boost
This setting changes the sharpness of the textures, mostly from a distance. It has generally a low impact of performance but if you really want to squeeze out the extra frames, set this to bilinear. However, going for the highest settings will be very noticeable in less performance.
Ambient Occlusion Quality
15% FPS Boost
Ambient occlusion give the game realistic ambient lighting and was quite a load for most GPU’s back in the days. Today, with new technology, the impact on performance is less noticeable, and you can easily put this setting at low-medium for a nice game experience. But for the competitive player go for Disabled.
Sun Shadow Coverage
4% FPS Boost
This setting controls the coverage of the shadows from the sun in-game. Turning this down will reduce CPU and GPU load so set this at Low.
Also you want as little distractions as possible while playing these type of games, and removing additional shadows will help you focus.
Sun Shadow Detail
2% FPS Boost
Same as above, but how detailed the shadows will be. Set this at Low.
Spot Shadow Detail
3% FPS Boost
This settings is regarding the shadows from lights in the environments, and will also save performance of the CPU and GPU. Set this setting to Disabled.
Volumetric Lighting
5% FPS Boost
This is whether you want to see sunbeams or not. Set this at Disable to save additional load and unnecessary distractions.
Dynamic Spot Shadows
Disable this to gain more performance. It will disable whether lights in the environment can move.
Model Detail
5% FPS Boost
This setting will reduce GPU load and set this to Low for best performance.
If you have relatively high video card RAM for you can go higher.
Effects Detail
Set this at Low as well to limit the effects eating up performance.
Additionally, it will give you less distractions in stressfull situations where effects like explosions will be less visual.
Impact Marks
Has very little impact on performance, set this to Low.
Ragdolls
Controls how physically accurate eliminated bodies are, set this to Low as it is totally unnecessary.
Competitive Apex Legends Settings – Increase FPS
For enabling us to make an in-depth guide on optimizing the performance of Apex Legends, we have to look at what system requirements are for Ops 4. Having a quad-core CPU are highly recommended.
Minimum system requirements:
- OS: Windows 7, 64-bit
- 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 7700
- HDD: 30GB of free space
Recommended system requirements:
- OS: Windows 10, 64-bit
- CPU: Intel i5 3570K or equivalent
- RAM: 8GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290
- HDD: 30GB of free space
Obviously, having lower than these are not ideal and higher will significantly increase your performance in the game.
Nevertheless, there is still much more you can do except getting better hardware like mention above. Some settings require more work than others, and it’s up to you how important every increase in performance is.
Let’s move along.
Apex Legends NVIDIA Settings Optimization
If you still want to squeeze some extra performance and you can’t do much on the hardware situation, and you have an NVIDIA graphics card, it might be an idea to optimize some additional settings. It probably won’t do a world of a difference as in-game settings, and your setup would do.
If you still want to squeeze some extra performance and you can’t do much on the hardware situation, and you have an NVIDIA graphics card, it might be an idea to optimize some additional settings. It probably won’t do a world of a difference as in-game settings, and your setup could do.
- Open the NVIDIA Control Panel and select Manage 3D Settings, choose Program Settings and select Apex Legends as your program to customize.
- Set Anisotropic filtering to Off
- Set Antialiasing – FXAA to Off
- Set Antialiasing – Gamma Correction to Off
- Set Antialiasing – Mode to Off
- Set Antialiasing – Setting to None
- Set Antialiasing – Transparency to Off
- Set Maximum Pre-rendered Frames to 1
- Set Power Management Mode to Prefer maximum performance
- Set Preferred Refresh Rate to Highest available
- Set Shader Cache to On
- Set Texture Filtering – Anisotropic Sample option to Off
- Set Texture Filtering – Negative LOD bias to Allow
- Set Texture Filtering – Quality to High performance
- Set Texture Filtering – Trilinear Optimization to Off
- Set Threaded Optimization to On
- Set Triple Buffering to Off
- Set Vertical Sync to Off
Discord Hardware Acceleration
A lot of you use Discord as preferred voice-over chat while playing games with friends and family. Optimize it by turning off the option Hardware Acceleration if you notice FPS drops in games, including Black Ops 4. It takes off some load of the application by using your GPU to make Discord smoother.
Go to Preferences > Appearance > Turn off Hardware Acceleration.
Google Chrome Hardware Acceleration
Just like Discord, many gamers use Google Chrome as their primary web-browser. Also, similar it has an option for turning off Hardware Acceleration.
It might be worth doing if you often find yourself having a browser active while playing games, like on a secondary monitor.
Go to Settings > Advanced > Turn off Use Hardware Acceleration When Available.
Don’t Run Unnecessary Programs in the Background
This might be quite obvious, but if don’t have a high-end computer this can greatly help dedicate its resources. Of course, if you enjoy gaming with a Twitch stream, music or VoIP applications, do so.
The best way to keep your performance at peak levels is to use a CPU Management software system like CPUCores. CPUCores will automatically close, reduce CPU load and generally optimize CPU settings for maximum FPS in any game. See more here:
CPUCores will optimize and manage your CPU Resources to seamlessly offer you more power and FPS just by downloading the program and running your game client from their interface.
Installing the software is simple, and takes only a few easy steps:
- Install the software straight from Steam
- Locate your game in the interface window
- Hit “Start Game”
That’s it! It’s really that simple, and you can enjoy a higher FPS, quicker gameplay, and more responsive controls.
Gaming Gear
If you enjoy competitive gaming you are at a big disadvantage if you don’t have a monitor that can deliver high FPS counts or a gaming mouse with a good and accurate sensor. Even sound will surprise you on how much it will help you in pinpointing your enemies before you see them, especially in a battle royale themed game where survivability is everything.
Does a 144Hz Monitor actually give you an advantage?
High refreshment gaming has grown immensely in the last couple of years, and you literally can’t find a professional player today who has under 144hz of a refresh rate. Most standard PC monitors today has around 60-70hz and most of us don’t even have knowledge about it or what it does.
So the question is, can you see a difference from let’s say a 60hz monitor compared to a 144hz? Let’s talk about that.
Now, we have to first understand that refresh rate and frame rate is not the same thing. FPS, or frames per second, is what most gamers chase as they want to optimize their games and performances. Frame rate is how many frames your GPU or graphics card can render in one second, and all these frames get sent to the monitor to be displayed.
And here is where refresh rate of your monitor comes in, it’s quite straightforward. Let’s say your computer delivers 200 FPS while playing Apex Legends, but on the other hand, your monitor has a 60hz refresh rate. It refreshing the frames 60 times per second, but you have 200 frames available to be displayed. Do you see where this is going?
So can you see a difference? Yes! You might experience ‘blurriness’ as your brain is trying to put together the frames in a sequence, with more data you have an easier time tracing a target or reacting faster to fast movements as the screen gets updated more frequently. You could also experience input lag, for example as you press your mouse button, it takes longer before you actually see it physically on your monitor due to lower refresh rate.
Gaming Mice
To be able to do accurate and consistent mouse movements you have to have a reliable mouse. A responsive mouse can significantly improve your performance in games, and just like the monitor, it has an update rate. Called polling rate, meaning how often the mouse is communicating its position to the computer. Similar also measured in Hz, most gaming mice today has a polling rate of 1000 Hz and you should too!
That means it reports its position an incredible 1000 times per second, so you can without a doubt know that your mouse is being registered frequently.
Sure, even at 300-500 Hz and upwards you as a human, probably can’t notice a difference. However, as this is pretty much standard today in the gaming community, and not a hard to get feature it worth having in mind when choosing a gaming mouse.
The other important aspect of mouse dedicated for gaming is DPI or dots per inch. Essentially, it is how fast your mouse cursor will travel. Almost like the mouse speed option in Windows, but many times more advanced. Today many game mice go all up to 16.000 DPI, which in a way is getting pretty ridiculous. You can read more about the polling rate and DPI in our guide, and why it matter for gaming.
So is it worth getting a gaming mouse? Definitely! Apart from superior technical features, they offer comfort for long sessions and gaming in mind. And RGB lightning customization for those who want a refreshing looking setup.
Last Words
After many hours of testing back and forth, we’re confident that you’ll increase your FPS in Apex Legends and overall performance. As soon as new updates are released or new information gathered, we’ll update this article with new tips & tricks of optimizing the settings.
In general, you could say that there are two types of gamers; those who want a nice looking and enjoyable experience and these competitive gamers who want the best possible performance with the highest FPS, no matter how the game actually looks.
Either way, you can find information and valuable tips for both here in our competitive guide on Apex Legends. Thanks for reading and let us know if you have any suggestions in the comment sections below.
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1 thought on “Best Settings for Apex Legends – Optimize Performance & Competitive Settings”
Another tip… If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix that; regarding Nvidia drivers!
2 separate computers and different games I have updated drivers and the game had issues. This last time I updated drivers after ignoring driver updates for about a year and after updating drivers, the game has lag spikes now(Apex) when it ran just as fine before the driver update and without the lag spikes!
Seems like the first few driver versions actually do improve features, but anything beyond a year or so just handicaps your GFX card making you think it’s time to go spend more on a new card when it actually is the drivers ruining your card.