Apex Legends PC Optimization and Benchmarks (2024)

Apex Legends remains one of the most popular Battle Royale games with over 300K concurrent players on Steam. Although the game launched back in 2019, it can be a little taxing if you are running it on a notebook or an iGPU. In this post, we look at the various graphics settings available in the game and figure out which ones cost the most.

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Our Test Bench

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
• Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X670E-F.
• Cooler: Lian Li Galahad 360.
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.
• Memory: 16GB x2 DDR5-6000 CL30.
• Power Supply: Corsair RM1000e.

Given that our testbench is quite beefy, we decided to test the game at 5K to eliminate any CPU bottlenecks. First, we tested Apex with all settings maxed out. This was then used as the reference point to calculate the performance impact of individual graphics options.

Apex Legends: Textures, Lighting, and Anti-Aliasing

The texture quality (streaming budget) is usually set per the GPU buffer size. Apex recommends a 2GB VRAM buffer for “Very Low” and 4GB or higher for “Medium.” However, if you’re running the game on an iGPU lacking discrete memory, you might want to set the texture budget to “None.” This confers a 5-10% performance uplift over higher quality levels.

Disabling TAA (Temporal Anti-aliasing) improves 1% lows by 15%. Depending on whether you like smooth or sharp textures, you might want to enable and disable it.

Volumetric Lighting can have a substantial impact on visual quality. But you probably won’t notice the difference in a fast-paced Battle Royale like Apex Legends. Disabling it grants a 12% uplift in lows.

If texture detail or sharpness means anything to you, then “Anisotropic Filtering” is necessary. Luckily, 4x to 8x tends to be enough without being much of a drain on performance. Trilinear filtering is 16% faster than 16x AF, while 2x AF is 8% faster. Even 8x AF is ~8% quicker than 16x if you only consider the lows.

Ambient occlusion is used to implement soft shadows without the complexity of global illumination. Going from High to Off improves frame rates by ~19%, while Medium and Low have a much more modest impact.

Apex Legends: Level of Detail (LOD)

Level of Detail (LOD) sets the polygon complexity of 3D objects in a scene. Higher values add more depth and shape to otherwise banal structures. “Model Detail” subtly impacts game performance, reducing frame rates by 4-5% at Medium and 8-9% at High.

“Effects Detail” is similar, except it controls the resolution of special effects like explosions, fireworks, and sparks. Like “Model Detail,” it has a nominal impact on performance, except in this case, you probably won’t even notice it.

Shadow Quality: Sun, Spot, and Dynamic

Apex Legends features three different implementations of shadows: Sun, Spot, and Dynamic. The first one is self-explanatory. Spot shadows are the shadows cast by static objects and are stationary or baked-in. Dynamic shadows are cast by moving objects such as the player or enemy character.

“Sun Shadow Coverage” has the most noticeable impact on performance, reducing frame rates by up to 20%. “Sun Shadow” and “Spot Shadow Detail” increase frametimes by up to 10%, while “Dynamic Spot Shadows” barely have an impact.

“Spot Shadow Detail” has five options: Off, Low, High, Very High, and Ultra. Anything other than the highest preset will run about as smoothly as the lowest setting. Focus on the lows here as the averages are well above 144 FPS.

Apex Legends: VRAM Usage

We tested the game at 5K, so keep that in mind. The VRAM consumption at 1080p and 1440p will be substantially lower, but this will give you an idea of how far apart the different quality presets are:

Apex Legends uses over 10 GB of graphics memory at the highest “Texture Streaming Budget” at 5K. High reduces it to 9.53 GB, while Medium further brings it down to 9.15 GB. Low and Very Low consume 8.77-8.86 GB, and None uses just over 8.5 GB. For 1080p and 1440p, a 6 to 8 GB graphics card will be sufficient.

Optimized Settings for Apex Legends

Since Apex is an old game that runs well on newer hardware, our definitions of the three tiers are different from usual: