Apex Legends patched because AMD Ryzen X3D CPUs were fast enough to break the game

Apex Legends’ Overclocked update includes performance fixes for AMD’s Ryzen X3D CPUs

Respawn Entertainment has confirmed that fast CPUs are causing stutters in Apex Legends, with AMD’s Ryzen X3D CPUs particularly prone to this issue. With the game’s newly released “Overclocked” update, improvements have been made to Apex Legends’ physics calculations to prevent these issues on PC. That’s right, AMD’s Ryzen X3D CPUs are so fast that Apex Legends needed to be updated to properly support them.

While AMD’s Ryzen X3D chips are specifically mentioned, this issue can happen with all “CPUs with high single-threaded performance”. This means that this would have become a growing problem as PC CPUs became faster and faster. Because of this, Respawn Entertainment had to rewrite how CPU physics was calculated to eliminate this issue.

Improved CPU performance on physics calculations, eliminating a source of stutters, especially prominent in CPUs with high single-threaded performance, like Ryzen X3D chips.

– Apex Legends Patch Notes

Great news for high-framerate Apex Legends players

In another part of Apex Legends’ patch notes, it says that an issue was fixed that could cause ” an occasional framerate dips” when running at high framerates on PC. The example given was for PCs running at “240+” FPS. Thanks to the game’s Overclocked update, gamers can now play Apex Legends with absurdly high framerates without these stutters.

With 240Hz+ monitors becoming more commonly available, it is great to see game developers optimising their games for absurdly high framerates. This is especially true for a competitive shooter like Apex Legends.

ENGINE

• Graphics
  • Improved occlusion data structures that were used by Olympus in the last midseason update are now used for all maps, slightly improving CPU performance.
  • Fixed an issue that could lead to an occasional framerate dip when running at very high FPS on PC (e.g. 240+).
  • Cleaner Ambient Occlusion, which includes new specular occlusion. This will also be faster than the previous Ambient Occlusion in most cases, except at High or Ultra settings at high resolutions (4K on PC).
  • Improved accuracy of cubemap reflection intensity, especially in shadowed outdoor areas.
  • Improved accuracy of sky ambient lighting.
  • Improved baked lighting accuracy for many props in maps.

– Apex Legends Patch Notes

AMD’s Ryzen X3D CPUs are well known for their strong gaming performance. That said, Intel is planning to contest AMD in this area with its upcoming Nova Lake series CPUs. With Nova Lake, Intel reportedly plans to release CPU models with “bLLC” cache. If this is true, Intel will counter AMD’s X3D CPUs with processors with similarly large last-level caches. This should dramatically increase Intel’s CPU performance in games.

Moving forward, it could become increasingly common for competitive games like Apex Legends to have CPU-related performance issues with ultra-fast gaming processors. Most games aren’t designed to run at such high framerates. That means that issues like this can crop up when significant performance boosts are achieved.

Full patch notes for Apex Legends’ Overclocked update are available here.

You can join the discussion on Apex Legends’ performance update for AMD Ryzen X3D CPUs on the OC3D Forums.