What PC do you need for Apex Legends?
Apex Legends unexpectedly burst into gaming arena. Respawn and EA introduced the game on February 4 — and immediately released it. Not a demo or an early build full of technical errors, as is it’s usually works in Early Access, but a finished, carefully polished game. Over 1 million of people tested the new royal battle in the first 8 hours, 2.5 million in 24 hours, and 10 million in three days. The total peak of online players exceeded one million users. So we decided to prepare a useful article about the features and performance of Apex Legends and PC required for it.
System requirements
The official system requirements of the shooter from the developers of Titanfall look quite low. Minimum system requirements:
· CPU: Intel Core i3–6300/AMD FX-4350,
· Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 640/AMD Radeon HD 7730,
· RAM: 6 GB.
The game needs 22 GB of storage. Here are recommended system requirements:
· Core i5–3570K/Ryzen 5,
· GeForce GTX 970/Radeon R9 290
· 8 GB of RAM.
Real tests
We haven’t seen any particular complaints about Apex Legends — Respawn did their job well to polish the game. Optimization is great — that’s what an AAA product means. By the way, Respawn representatives believe that there are only two AAA royal battles on the market: Apex Legends and Fortnite (Blackout in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is not counted, as it is a game mode, not a standalone game). So according to them their main competitors are Fortnite and PUBG.
An authoritative PC Gamer magazine called the performance of Apex Legends generally good. The author of the publication launched the game on Core i7–8700K paired with GTX 1060 (6 GB version)/RX 580 (8 GB). Both configurations showed nearly the same results. At 1080p on the lowest settings, we could see 100+ fps. On ultra settings frame rate dropped to 70–80. At 1440p, on the lowest settings frame rate was close to 60 fps, while on ultra settings we could see 45–50 fps. Finally, both configurations couldn’t run the game in 4K — threshold 30 of fps was passed only by disabling/lowering all other settings.
If you have a card of GTX 1060 (6 GB) performance level, you won’t have any issues getting 60 fps at Full HD. However, GTX 1050 Ti is hardly able to provide such experience; the only solution is to drop your settings to minimum. So the conclusion is quite obvious — budget PCs don’t really run the game well (only if you drop everything to minimum), mid-range will run at 60 fps, but maybe not on ultra settings. It’s worth to think about Playkey.net subscription, don’t you think so?
How to get more fps in Apex Legends?
The easiest way to get more fps in Apex Legends is lowering graphics settings. Check out the settings:
· + 6%: turning off TSAA anti-aliasing.
· + 6%: changing Texture Streaming Budget (texture quality/resolution) from “Insane” to “None”.
· + 6%: changing Texture Filtering from 16x Anisotropic Filtering to Bilinear.
· + 15%: disabling Ambient Occlusion Quality.
· + 5%: changing Sun Shadow Coverage (affects global illumination): from “High” to “Low”.
· + 3%: changing Sun Shadow Detail (sun shadow details): from “High” to “Low”.
· + 3%: disabling Spot Shadow Detail (shadows, but not from the sun or global illumination).
· + 6%: disabling Volumetric Lighting.
· + 6%: setting Model Detail (characters and objects detail) to “Low”.
As a result, we get + 56% to fps on GTX 1060 (6 GB). Not bad, right? You can ask about the Dynamic Spot Shadows settings (shadows from moving light sources), Effects Detail (visual effects quality e.g. explosions), Impact Marks and Ragdolls. However, changing these settings doesn’t affect the frame rate in the PC Gamer tests (or only increased CPU load, like Ragdolls setting).
Why should you try Apex Legends?
Well, let’s talk about the main question — why did Apex Legends attract gamers so much?
Respawn Entertainment, known for Titanfall and Titanfall 2, started developing the royal battle in the spring of 2017 from scratch. All three games have the same gamer engine — time-honored Source. The games even have the same universe, but the studio reluctantly tells the Apex Legends story, because there are no titans and wall running in it, so why should they? By the way, several games with “Titanfall” in the title are in the development right now, as Vince Zampella, the CEO of Respawn, told in Twitter.
You may think that the battle royale genre already has an efficient concept that does not need any improvements, but Respawn did not follow the path of its competitors. The map in Apex Legends is quite small (9 sq. km) and the landing goes extremely quickly. 60 participants are divided into teams of three. So far, the game has only this mode — solo mode is not planned for the near future.
Apex Legends is not only a team-focused shooter, but also a hero shooter, similar to Overwatch. The characters called Legends have Tactical, Passive and Ultimate abilities. The use of Tactical and Ultimate abilities is limited by cool down. Interestingly, the speed of the fighters is the same, and a fallen squadmate can be revived if you reach the revival station in time. A convenient tagging system (it is easy to point opponents, objects, etc.) simplifies communication and allows playing without microphone.
The game looks fresh and interesting. Moreover, it’s free-to-play and you can buy skins, additional animations, phrases and other “decorations” or you can earn them in battles.
Apex Legends was released only a several days ago. It’s never late to join, but better do it sooner!
