How to Fix Freezing and Crashing in Apex Legends

Apex Legends is one of the best battle royales going, but it has never been the most stable game on PC. Crashes, freezes and stutters have followed it since launch, and every big update seems to bring a fresh batch.

There is no single fix, because there is no single cause. What follows is the list of things that actually resolve it, roughly in the order worth trying them. Start at the top and work down.

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Repair the game files

Corrupted files after an update are the most common cause of crashes on launch, and it takes two minutes to rule out.

On the EA App, go to your library, click the three dots on Apex Legends and choose Repair. On Steam, right click the game, then Properties, Installed Files, and Verify integrity of game files.

Update your graphics drivers

Apex is sensitive to driver versions and both NVIDIA and AMD ship game-ready updates regularly. If you have not updated in a while, do that first.

If the crashes started immediately after a driver update, do the opposite and roll back to the previous version. New drivers occasionally break things, and Apex tends to be one of the first games to show it.

Turn off your overlays

This one fixes a surprising number of cases. Discord, Steam, the EA App, the NVIDIA app and MSI Afterburner all inject themselves into the game, and any of them can cause a freeze.

Turn them all off, then re-enable them one at a time if you want them back. The in-game FPS counters are the usual culprits.

Easy Anti-Cheat

If the game freezes at a consistent point, typically the dropship at the start of a match or when you return to the lobby, Easy Anti-Cheat is the most likely cause. It has been the single biggest source of Apex crash reports for a while now.

Repair Easy Anti-Cheat

Go to the Apex Legends install folder, open the __Installer folder, then EasyAntiCheat, and run EasyAntiCheat_Setup.exe. Choose Repair rather than Uninstall.

If that does not work, uninstalling Easy Anti-Cheat from that same tool and then repairing the game through the EA App or Steam will reinstall it cleanly.

Check your antivirus

Anti-cheat software and antivirus software do very similar things and often disagree. If you have added an exception for Easy Anti-Cheat, try removing it. If you have not, try adding one. Both have fixed it for different people.

Windows Defender is usually fine. Third party antivirus, less so.

Look for conflicting software

Easy Anti-Cheat flags a lot of legitimate software as suspicious. Virtual drive tools, macro software, older RGB control utilities and anything that hooks into other processes can all trigger it.

A clean boot is the fastest way to find out. Disable all non-Microsoft startup services, launch the game, and if it works, re-enable them in batches until it breaks again.

Display and performance settings

Try windowed borderless

Full screen exclusive mode has caused freezes in Apex for years. Windowed borderless is marginally worse for input latency but far more stable, and plenty of players have simply left it that way.

Cap your frame rate

An uncapped frame rate in menus and the firing range can push your graphics card unnecessarily hard and cause crashes on some systems.

Add +fps_max 144 to your launch options, matching the number to your monitor's refresh rate. It is also worth doing simply because there is no benefit to rendering frames your monitor cannot display.

Turn off G-Sync or FreeSync temporarily

Adaptive sync can conflict with the game's own frame limiting on some setups. Worth disabling to test, though for most people it is not the problem and you will want it back on.

When it is the hardware

If none of the above helps, and particularly if your whole PC restarts or blue screens rather than just the game closing, the problem is more likely to be physical.

Memory

Unstable memory is a common cause of crashes that only show up in demanding games. If you have XMP or EXPO enabled in the BIOS, turn it off temporarily and see whether the crashes stop. If they do, your memory is not running reliably at its rated speed.

Windows Memory Diagnostic will confirm it, though MemTest86 is more thorough if you want to be certain.

Heat

A machine that crashes after twenty minutes rather than immediately is usually getting too hot. Check your processor and graphics card temperatures with HWMonitor or MSI Afterburner while you play.

Anything above 90 degrees under load is worth investigating. Dust in the cooler is the usual explanation, and it is a five minute fix.

Power supply

If your PC shuts down completely rather than showing an error, an underpowered or ageing power supply is a strong candidate, especially if you have upgraded your graphics card since the machine was built.

See also: why does my PC restart when gaming?

The processor

Apex is harder on the processor than most shooters, because it is tracking sixty players, their movement and their hit detection at a high frame rate. An older quad-core will struggle, and no amount of settings tweaking will change that.

If your frame rate collapses when you land in a busy area but recovers once the lobby thins out, that is a processor limit rather than a graphics one.

Still not fixed?

Some crashes are simply the game's fault, and a patch resolves them a week or two later. Checking the Apex Legends technical issues forum is worth doing before you take your PC apart, because if hundreds of people reported the same thing on the same day, it is not your machine.

If it is your machine, and the fixes above have not helped, it may be that Apex is asking for more than it can give. See the best gaming PCs for Apex Legends for what runs it properly, or build your own with our online configurator.