Apex Legends — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 3% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Texture Quality at High (3% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Apex Legends: Determines which mip tier the texture streaming pool prioritizes for legend skins, weapon models, and environmental surfaces across Apex's maps. At High, 2K/4K maps are loaded — the 4 GB VRAM budget at 1080p handles this cleanly, but sub-4 GB cards exhibit hitching during hot-drops when the streaming pool overflows to system RAM. The direct per-frame FPS cost is negligible when VRAM is sufficient; the real risk is frame-time variance during intense scene transitions and contested landing zones.

Typical impact 0-2% · 2% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Texture Filtering at Anisotropic 16x (2% fps cost).

Determines the sampling method when textures are viewed at oblique angles. Bilinear samples a single mip; trilinear blends between two mip levels to remove seams. Anisotropic filtering takes multiple samples along the axis of greatest compression, preserving sharpness on surfaces like roads and floors seen at steep angles. Modern GPUs have dedicated anisotropic filtering hardware in the texture units, making even 16x virtually free.

In Apex Legends: Apex supports anisotropic filtering up to 16x, most visibly improving sharpness on the ground planes and sloped terrain that dominate Storm Point and World's Edge sightlines. At Off, surfaces viewed at oblique angles blur aggressively. Anisotropic 16x resolves this with negligible performance cost since the GPU's texture unit hardware handles AF independently of shader ALU work — it does not compete with fragment shading for execution resources. Set to 16x and leave it alone.

Typical impact 8-25% · 4% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Shadow Quality at Low (4% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Apex Legends: Controls shadow map resolution for dynamic scene objects in Apex's Source-lineage renderer. At Off, all dynamic shadows are eliminated — a legitimate competitive choice since removing shadow noise can sharpen enemy legend readability on bright maps like Olympus. High significantly increases shadow map texel density, producing crisper edges but increasing GPU bandwidth demand during the dedicated depth-only shadow render pass. The FPS swing between Off and High is one of the largest available in the entire settings menu.

Typical impact 5-15% · 3% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Shadow Detail at Low (3% fps cost).

Supplements shadow quality with additional shadow techniques. Higher settings add contact shadows (screen-space ray marching from each pixel toward the light to detect small-scale self-shadowing), increase the number of shadow-casting point/spot lights processed per frame, and enable shadow caching for static geometry. Contact shadows are computed as a post-process using the depth buffer — the ray march samples 8-32 depth taps per pixel, scaling linearly with resolution.

In Apex Legends: Determines how many secondary shadow casters — ability props like Caustic barrels, Rampart fences, and weapon attachments — are rendered into the shadow map each frame. At High, these objects cast individual shadows, adding draw calls to the shadow pass whenever ability geometry is on screen. The cost spikes during late-ring ability-heavy engagements. At Off or Low, secondary casters are culled, reducing shadow pass submissions with minimal impact on core enemy silhouette readability in active firefights.

Typical impact 3-8% · 4% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Model Detail at High (4% fps cost).

Controls the geometric complexity of character and object meshes by selecting between pre-authored LOD tiers. Lower settings swap in reduced-polygon meshes earlier, cutting vertex shader invocations and rasterizer triangle throughput. This also reduces the number of material draw calls since simplified meshes often merge material slots. The CPU cost of skinning and animation blending also scales with vertex count on games that use CPU-side skeletal animation.

In Apex Legends: Affects polygon count on character models and weapon skins. High is recommended — it improves enemy visibility at distance.

Typical impact 3-15% · 3% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Effect Quality at Medium (3% fps cost).

Controls the visual fidelity of gameplay effects including explosions, weapon impacts, ability VFX, and environmental interactions. Higher settings increase particle emitter counts per effect, use higher-resolution flipbook or mesh particles instead of simple sprites, enable GPU particle simulation via compute shaders, and add dynamic lighting from effects (each explosion spawning a temporary point light). The cost is highly variable — intense combat with multiple overlapping effects can produce 4-8x overdraw from layered transparent particles.

In Apex Legends: Governs particle emitter density, flipbook texture resolution, and GPU simulation complexity for all legend ability and weapon VFX. At High, ultimates like Bangalore's Rolling Thunder and Fuse's Motherlode spawn significantly more particles with dynamic light contributions per explosion. During multi-squad third-party fights, layered transparent particle overdraw causes the largest frame-time spikes in Apex. Dropping to Low cuts per-emitter particle counts noticeably, delivering meaningful FPS recovery precisely in the combat scenarios that most stress the engine.

Typical impact 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (4% fps cost).

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

In Apex Legends: Apex's screen-space AO runs a fullscreen depth-buffer sampling pass each frame, adding soft contact shadows in interior spaces and around legend clothing geometry. At High, sample count per pixel increases, improving AO quality in tight corridors on maps like World's Edge's Fragment city blocks. The per-pixel ALU cost scales with quality tier and screen resolution. At Off, the loss is most apparent indoors — exterior areas with strong directional sun lighting show little perceptible difference and are safer to sacrifice.

Typical impact 5-12% · 3% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Sun Shadow Coverage at Low (3% fps cost).

Determines the maximum distance at which the sun directional light casts dynamic shadows via cascaded shadow maps. Each cascade covers a progressively larger world-space area — extending coverage requires either more cascades (more shadow map render passes) or larger individual cascade coverage (reducing shadow texel density). Higher settings push the far cascade out to 200m+, meaning the GPU must render shadow-casting geometry across a much larger frustum.

In Apex Legends: Unique to modified Source engine — controls how far sun-cast shadows extend. Low = shadows only near player. High = full map coverage. 5-8% FPS impact.

Typical impact 2-15% · 3% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at TSAA (3% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Apex Legends: Apex offers only TSAA — Respawn's temporal accumulation AA built into the modified Source engine — with no MSAA or FXAA alternative. TSAA uses per-frame jitter and motion vectors to reconstruct smooth edges over time, avoiding the ROP cost of MSAA. The trade-off is characteristic image softness on distant legend silhouettes, notable in a title where reading enemies at range is critical. Disabling AA sharpens the pixel read at the cost of geometric aliasing on edges — a common competitive preference combined with driver-level sharpening.

Typical impact 5-18% · 6% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Volumetric Fog at On (6% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Apex Legends: Apex uses volumetric lighting for atmosphere. Disable for competitive play — it obscures sightlines in Ring zones.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In Apex Legends, we recommend Ragdolls at High (2% fps cost).

Controls the complexity of physics-based ragdoll animations on defeated characters. Higher settings increase the number of rigid bodies and constraints in each ragdoll skeleton, enable joint limits and angular motor springs for more realistic collapse animations, and increase the maximum number of simultaneous active ragdolls. The physics simulation runs on the CPU using Havok, PhysX, or a custom solver — each ragdoll with 15-30 rigid bodies requires constraint solving every physics tick.

In Apex Legends: Apex uses Havok-based ragdoll physics for eliminated legends. At High, each downed body activates a multi-joint rigid body skeleton solved per physics tick, with terrain and prop collision — producing realistic tumbling across Apex's varied elevation geometry. CPU cost accumulates in chaotic third-party fights where multiple legends are eliminated in rapid succession. The modified Source engine is already prone to render-thread CPU bottlenecks; high simultaneous ragdoll counts add further CPU contention in exactly the worst-case high-action scenarios.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Apex Legends, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.