Apex Legends input lag changes from day to day

[Raphaeangelo]

DISCLAIMER: This is only speculation based off of tests and observations but I think I have enough evidence to support these claims.

Background
I've been playing Apex Legends for about three years and I've constantly been chasing a "settings ghost" I've tried every settings guide you can image and they work...until they don't. This is how my experience goes. I play Apex for a few hours and something feels "off" (game feels heavy, aim is bad and it feels like I'm running through mud) so I Google around till I find some Apex setting I haven't tried. I give it a try and test. Wow everything feels great! I've finally solved the input lag problem in Apex!!! Till the next time I login and it's back to playing like garbage. I repeat the steps of Googling my issues and making a change only to have temp results. What gives??? This is seriously maddening. How am I supposed to improve in a game that's constantly changing? I thought it was hopeless till I came across these videos.

Showcasing how Input response/aim assist doesn't act the same on resolution that you used before.

phpBB [video]

TLDR this tester is in the firing range and showing how aim and input lag change based on what resolution they are on. You might be thinking like me "ok maybe the lower resolution is easier on the CPU thus resulting in better performance" but this is where it gets interesting. He tries this on different days. One day the lower resolution provides better results (better results = better aim and movement) the next day the lower resolution results in higher input lag and worse results. The game's input lag varies based on resolutions, which change from day to day!? This seems unbelievable, so I had to test it out.

How I tested this theory.
I go into the firing range, I keep all my settings the same (low everything) and only change the resolution, making note of my accuracy percentage (you can turn this accuracy metric on in the range settings). Each resolution results in different accuracy. I choose the resolution with the best accuracy and use it for the day. When I play Apex for that day, everything feels really good - I land more shots and do more damage. But the next time I log into Apex (days later), it feels "off" again. I repeat this process, and wouldn't you know it, I get better results on a different resolution! Sometimes it's better on lower resolutions, and sometimes it's better on higher resolutions.

How can this be happening? I have a theory (this is the speculation part): EA is randomly making the game worse for retention reasons. I play longer/more when I'm doing badly in the game (gamblers addiction), than I do when I'm playing well. When I do well in the game, I play less; "That was a good session, I'm jumping off for the day." I know that sounds wild, but it's the only explanation for this strange behavior with the resolution. Please give it a try and report back your findings.

My Specs
Intel i5 13700K (water cooled not overheating issues)
MSI Tomahawk z790
DDR4 cas 13 3600 b-die
RTX 3080 ti
MSI 360hz gaming monitor
PS dual sense 250hz polling rate controller (Tried OC to 1000hz made no difference in apex inconsistency problem)

My current settings (I've tried everything. No difference in apex inconsistency problem)
Stock clocks, high performance power plan, VSYNC/GSYNC disabled, 360hz refresh rate, 120fps cap, 250hz controller polling rate, disabled hyperthreading, disabled e-cores, disabled c-states, disabled turbo boost

[TN_fun]

This is not EA dude. Try playing DIFFERENT games. The same thing will happen in absolutely any game.

[Raphaeangelo]

Believe me I have. This doesn’t happen in Halo, Doom, Fortnite and many other games I’ve tested.

What do you mean this happens on every game? You mean in every game you get wildly different input lag, day to day, when you change to different resolutions? I don’t think so.

[Slender]

Believe me I have. This doesn’t happen in Halo, Doom, Fortnite and many other games I’ve tested.

What do you mean this happens on every game? You mean in every game you get wildly different input lag, day to day, when you change to different resolutions? I don’t think so.

when you change resolution in game, some is changes in windows.
you can check it:
1) go to game and play on 1920x1080, when you feel bad, quit game, go win.display and change hz or resolution and go back to your res/hz, open game.
2) go to game, play on 1920x1080, quit, make restart64.exe, go to game.

1000000000000% your game feel is diff.

[ApexLeg]

Interesting, I definitely have difference on different days how Apex feels.

I tried this yesterday with different resolutions with Mouse Movement Recorder in the background, I couldn't feel too much difference in between and the results (whilst alt-tabbing back and forth to desktop) on MMR were pretty similar. Anyway, I put it back to native and then went to play and had the best session I've had in ages. I'm still relatively new to the game and for a long time Platinum was near impossible for me due to ferrari peeks and enemy movements being erratic, but yesterdays session these problems were at a minimum - the game felt smoother and easier.

I've definitely read things going back 15 years ago about the game feeling different when Alt+Tabbing in and out of the game, so maybe windows or DWM or something is going cukoo and changing some sort of scaling now and again during when Windows is loaded?

[bleya99]

Interesting, I definitely have difference on different days how Apex feels.

I tried this yesterday with different resolutions with Mouse Movement Recorder in the background, I couldn't feel too much difference in between and the results (whilst alt-tabbing back and forth to desktop) on MMR were pretty similar. Anyway, I put it back to native and then went to play and had the best session I've had in ages. I'm still relatively new to the game and for a long time Platinum was near impossible for me due to ferrari peeks and enemy movements being erratic, but yesterdays session these problems were at a minimum - the game felt smoother and easier.

I've definitely read things going back 15 years ago about the game feeling different when Alt+Tabbing in and out of the game, so maybe windows or DWM or something is going cukoo and changing some sort of scaling now and again during when Windows is loaded?

Here is my suggestion, it might or might not fix the particular issue you are facing.

I have 2 accounts that I play on, since I play on work as well, and on my new account (50ish hours in cs2 and apex) the game is so much smoother. The frame pacing, the sensitivity, even for smaller flicks. I literally went 1 game on each account just to make sure I am correct.

There was a theory that having a lot of friends would make your game lag on Apex, and I believe having a big inventory on cs2.

The solution that I saw on the net was deleting the userdata, and now even on my main account the game is much smoother and kind of "slower" making it easier to track, as not everything is just erratic.

Make sure to back up the files or a file, depending on how many accounts you have on Steam.

Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata and delete what's inside the folder. Again, some of your settings will reset.

Let me know if your game improved.

[agstrato]

Interesting, I definitely have difference on different days how Apex feels.

I tried this yesterday with different resolutions with Mouse Movement Recorder in the background, I couldn't feel too much difference in between and the results (whilst alt-tabbing back and forth to desktop) on MMR were pretty similar. Anyway, I put it back to native and then went to play and had the best session I've had in ages. I'm still relatively new to the game and for a long time Platinum was near impossible for me due to ferrari peeks and enemy movements being erratic, but yesterdays session these problems were at a minimum - the game felt smoother and easier.

I've definitely read things going back 15 years ago about the game feeling different when Alt+Tabbing in and out of the game, so maybe windows or DWM or something is going cukoo and changing some sort of scaling now and again during when Windows is loaded?

Here is my suggestion, it might or might not fix the particular issue you are facing.

I have 2 accounts that I play on, since I play on work as well, and on my new account (50ish hours in cs2 and apex) the game is so much smoother. The frame pacing, the sensitivity, even for smaller flicks. I literally went 1 game on each account just to make sure I am correct.

There was a theory that having a lot of friends would make your game lag on Apex, and I believe having a big inventory on cs2.

The solution that I saw on the net was deleting the userdata, and now even on my main account the game is much smoother and kind of "slower" making it easier to track, as not everything is just erratic.

Make sure to back up the files or a file, depending on how many accounts you have on Steam.

Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata and delete what's inside the folder. Again, some of your settings will reset.

Let me know if your game improved.

Just a hint: In the userdata folder there are all the games by "ID" number. For ex CS is 730, maybe just delete the Apex one instead of all.

[ApexLeg]

Interesting, I definitely have difference on different days how Apex feels.

I tried this yesterday with different resolutions with Mouse Movement Recorder in the background, I couldn't feel too much difference in between and the results (whilst alt-tabbing back and forth to desktop) on MMR were pretty similar. Anyway, I put it back to native and then went to play and had the best session I've had in ages. I'm still relatively new to the game and for a long time Platinum was near impossible for me due to ferrari peeks and enemy movements being erratic, but yesterdays session these problems were at a minimum - the game felt smoother and easier.

I've definitely read things going back 15 years ago about the game feeling different when Alt+Tabbing in and out of the game, so maybe windows or DWM or something is going cukoo and changing some sort of scaling now and again during when Windows is loaded?

Here is my suggestion, it might or might not fix the particular issue you are facing.

I have 2 accounts that I play on, since I play on work as well, and on my new account (50ish hours in cs2 and apex) the game is so much smoother. The frame pacing, the sensitivity, even for smaller flicks. I literally went 1 game on each account just to make sure I am correct.

There was a theory that having a lot of friends would make your game lag on Apex, and I believe having a big inventory on cs2.

The solution that I saw on the net was deleting the userdata, and now even on my main account the game is much smoother and kind of "slower" making it easier to track, as not everything is just erratic.

Make sure to back up the files or a file, depending on how many accounts you have on Steam.

Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata and delete what's inside the folder. Again, some of your settings will reset.

Let me know if your game improved.

Good point! There's a lot of discussion online about alternative accounts being smoother for a number of different games, I'll give it a try.

[howiec]

DISCLAIMER: This is only speculation based off of tests and observations but I think I have enough evidence to support these claims.

You're not alone. I have a high-end rig (13900K, 4090 FE, DDR5 7400 tight timings, performance tweaked PC & settings) and notice significant inconsistencies in perceived (end result / all-encompassing) mouse sensitivity and feel.
It's extremely unlikely that EA is actively trying to degrade or alter performance/consistency because that actually works against them for various reasons that we don't need to discuss but can if you'd like to. The following high-level explanation is actually what's happening.

From various objective tests it's extremely obvious that the perceived mouse sens in Apex Legends is extremely sensitive to any variation in your overall system performance which is just plain shitty design/coding (could also be partly/wholly due to some sort of major limitation/flaw inherent in the base Source game engine).

Now keep in mind the following general concept because this is crucial to understanding the general issue from a high level perspective for Apex:

• End performance depends on not just your PC specs (let's call it performance capacity or capability) but ALSO on the amount of load placed on the PC.
• E.g., an application could run faster overall if your PC specs are faster and/or if the application itself (or other applications too) runs a less intensive load on the system (less workload vs available performance = potentially faster execution) and vice versa.

So even if you were able to keep literally everything consistent from a performance capability perspective (run fixed CPU & GPU clocks, run exactly the same number of Windows processes with exact same number of threads & handles & commits, etc.) which is impossible, different maps and other game resources place a different load on the PC which hence affects end performance which in turn affects perceived mouse sens in Apex.

Players who are highly sensitive to the smallest differences will notice that perceived mouse sens is noticeably different between maps including the Firing Range (even if you cap FPS internally via "fps_max").

This is 100% NOT placebo and others have also confirmed the issue which you can also do via simple testing. Needless to say, they were flabbergasted at how much the issue can screw up aim and consistency.

Also, as one would expect, the underlying issue affects controller players too but aim assist generally helps mitigate/compensate the net effect for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately most people (but not all) are unaware of the issue. Most people think that they just need to practice and play more or build "muscle memory" with R5Reloaded.
Clearly, these methods (incl. PC performance/latency optimization) only have limited benefit because they can't address the underlying issue.
It's sad that you can see literally the top 0.01% MnK players in the world such as Aceu have insane aim on one map, only to be significantly worse on the next one.

Some other facts that most are unaware of:

• Changing any sens value (e.g., hipfire vs ADS vs per scope) affects all other values (during actual aiming even if those values have not been adjusted) which leads to the problem where you can never achieve optimal values because they're not independent of each other…
• The above also applies to controller sensitivities / settings AND:
• Your mouse settings & controller settings affect each other!
  • E.g., you'd think that "gamepad_custom_hip_turn_delay" or "gamepad_custom_ads_turn_time" don't affect your effective mouse sens but they do which is clearly shitty design!

I can go into further details in subsequent posts but this one is long enough.

[Unreazz]

Guys pls stop with this BS. there is no magic or hidden script which makes your overall ingame performance better. like all the people in Fifa who believes on "Momentum" pls activate your human logical brain. the only thing which can change during the time or day, is it the internet. based on how many people arround your area using it in the same time. mainly when they are back from the work, or its weekend.

This is the only thing which can change or for some people the "electricity input lag" what ever.

Pls for the sake of love, stop with this rumors/theories about illuminati changing my profil settings. if you really thinking about it in a logical way, like do you really think that DEV's would make such effort to put something like this in ? Besides of matchmaking which is real, but everything else is .... yeah what do you want to call it