by Apex Legends recently rolled out its "Overclocked" Season 29 update, which includes both new content and performance improvements for the venerable battle royale game. That's not normally cause for commotion at Digital Foundry HQ, but one line highlighted by wccftech caught our eye:
"Improved CPU performance on physics calculations, eliminating a source of stutters, especially prominent in CPUs with high single-threaded performance, like Ryzen X3D chips."
I think this is the first time that we've seen AMD's X3D processors specifically called out as a cause of stutters, which we normally tend to see get worse on less powerful CPUs, not better. However, we have seen plenty of instances where game physics have started to go wrong at higher frame-rates, with Dark Souls 2's massively increased weapon durability being one famous example, and Skyrim's poltergeist-like reaction to higher performance levels being another.
The Apex Legends patch is along similar lines, with X3D processors being capable of such high frame-rates (when used alongside similarly powerful GPUs), that physics calculations start to butt up against the limits of the modified Source engine used in the game. That led to a cacophony of stutters and movement glitches, and required players blessed with high-end equipment to use frame-rate limits to prevent issues. That shouldn't be necessary going forward, though the advantages of a capped and therefore predictable frame-rate shouldn't be understated.
The full Overclocked patch notes also detail a slight bump to CPU performance thanks to "improved occlusion data structures", a fix for occasional frame-rate dips above 240fps, cleaner and faster ambient occlusion, and improved accuracy for cubemap reflections, sky ambient lighting and baked lighting.
It's great to see the ongoing engineering efforts still ongoing seven years after Apex debuted, and three years following Alex's 2023 #stutterstruggle manifesto.