How to increase your in game FPS playing Apex Legends
I’m currently running Apex Legends smoothly at a solid 65 FPS on a laptop with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with Max Q design and 4 GB of dedicated RAM.
Other specs are: 500 GB SSD, i7 8750H and 16 GB RAM.
But first, a little disclaimer: I’m no professional gamer, and I don’t need 144 FPS when playing video games on my PC, I just want some decent performance to play along with my friends, who mainly play from consoles, and enjoy the game, that’s all.
Of course I know the specs of my PC aren’t the best for playing games, it’s instead a (great) PC for working / programming / studying and that’s the reason I bought it.
I used to be able to run Apex Legend at 24/25 FPS on average, which dropped even lower in team fights, to a point where it’s not playable at all, so I did a lot of research on EA forums and on the Apex Legend subreddit, looking for someone with my same specs who was able to play it at a stable frame rate and finally found the settings and parameters which were affecting my experience.
So let’s get started!
Let’s start with the obvious: let your laptop breathe. Don’t place it directly on your desk but try to elevate it with some supports on the sides as to allow proper ventilation and to avoid overheat your hardware components: don’t underestimate this tip because it can significantly improve your performance, especially after some hours of gaming.
Another one of the first thing to check as one of the first things is that Apex is actually using the right GPU (so in this case the Nvidia e not the integrated one, but just if we are on a laptop): to do so open the Nvidia control panel and select the Manage 3D settings tab.
Once in there navigate to the Program Setting tab and select Apex as the program you want to manage the settings. You may not find it right away, so a bit of navigating through your folders to remember where you installed may be needed (the executable is called r5apex.exe).
Once found be sure that at point 2. the High Performance NVIDIA processor is selected, if not select it.
Now let’s talk about something that usually affects lots of videogames and makes their performance go down as hell: in-game overlays.
These things really are bad if you want to perform well and the main 3 you can find on your pc and should disable are the following: Origin in game overlay, Nvidia Geforce in game overlay, and lastly Discord overlay, even if I find that the last one is the least problematic.
You can disable Origin in game from within its launcher, by going to settings from the gear icon and then Game preferences: once here we toggle the in-game origin to off, as shown in picture here.
For what concerns Nvidia instead you need to open GeForce Experience and once again click the gear icon in the upper right corner and click it. After that you will be prompted the settings of this program and similarly as before you need to toggle the in game Overlay.
Disabling in-game overlay of Discord is pretty easy on the other hand and you just need to head over the settings, selecting Overlay and toggle it off.
Onto something that I never actually considered before as I never thought it would affect the performance that much, but at the same time this setting alone improved by 20 FPS also another massive game such as COD: Warzone.
What I’m talking about is the mouse polling rate. Now this can be tricky to change, but if you own a gaming mouse it can be easily modified from within its management software, it just consists in doing some research on the internet just as you did when you stumbled upon this article.
In my case since I own an old Razed Ouroboros I just downloaded Razer Synapse and once it detected my mouse I changed it to 125 MHz from the default setting of 500 MHz.
Done? Nice.
Let’s now move on to the next big thing: command line arguments. No, don’t worry, you won’t need to use the command prompt or anything strange, we will easily do it from within the Origin launcher.
So as we did before for toggling the Origin in game overlay head to Game properties of Apex legends, but this time navigate to the third tab and write the following string in the command line arguments section:
-high -freq 66 -novid +fps_max 66
Let’s try to explain these arguments a little bit:
the -high argument means that we are going to give high priority to the process and thus it should be allocated more resources if needed.
The -freq 66 sets the refresh rate to the integer we specify, in this case 66 Hz: this option is related to the monitor.
The -novid options tells the game to skip intro videos and logos, this is not necessary but i like to keep it turned on.
In the end the +fps_max 66 caps the FPS to 66 instead of leaving it to unlimited.
After all of that let’s head to the in-game graphics settings: launch Apex legend and once logged in head to Settings -> Video and set them as follows:
As you can see here the Texture Streaming budget is set to High, which means that we are giving it 4 GB of VRAM, this is because my GPU has this amount, but should be set according to your hardware.
That’s it!
You’ve reached the end of this tutorial, so you should now be able to run this game at 60+ FPS without any drop or stuttering.
Of course given the amount of hours spent trying to find the right settings once I found that this combination worked flawlessly I didn’t want to change a thing, but if you want to experiment and tweak/change something it is possible that you get the same result even without some parameters cited in this article.
Hope this helps!
