League of Legends is already a fairly optimized game that should be able to run smoothly on most machines. However, this makes it even more infuriating when you have to face issues such as frame drops and stuttering and can’t find a suitable way to fix them. This can be especially tilting in a game as competitive as League, where every second is crucial.
So, in this guide, we will discuss some settings you can change to smooth out your League of Legends experience and save you from frustration on account of a slow machine.
Running League of Legends
Before we go on to discussing the settings configuration, it’s best if we take a look at your PC’s specifications to see if it meets the hardware requirements to run League of Legends.
League of Legends Recommended Requirements
- CPU: Intel Core i5-3300 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
- RAM: 4 GB
- OS: Windows 10 64-Bit
- VIDEO CARD: NVidia GeForce GTX 560 / AMD Radeon HD 6950 / Intel UHD 630 Integrated Graphics (DirectX 11)
- PIXEL SHADER: 5.0
- VERTEX SHADER: 5.0
If your PC specs are anywhere near what’s listed above, then you should have nothing to worry about as some light tweaking will get you a smooth 60 FPS even on the higher settings.
League of Legends System Requirements (Minimum)
- CPU: Intel Core i3-530 / AMD A6-3650
- RAM: 2 GB
- OS: Windows 7
- VIDEO CARD: NVidia GeForce 9600GT / AMD Radeon HD 6570 / Intel HD 4600 Integrated Graphics (DirectX 10)
- PIXEL SHADER: 4.0
- VERTEX SHADER: 4.0
- FREE DISK SPACE: 16 GB
While this isn’t the best hardware to run the game, following all our listed settings will help you squeeze out a fair bit of FPS in League of Legends.
League of Legends Settings to Maximize FPS
Now that your PC specifications are out of the way, let’s look at what you can tweak inside your client and game to make the experience smoother.
Enabling Low Spec Mode
Enabling the Low Spec Mode can make a considerable difference in your game’s FPS. Here’s how you can do that:
- Open League of Legends and click on the gear icon in the top right corner
- Open General Settings
- Check the “Enable Low Spec Mode” Dialogue box
Changing Video Settings
Lowering down the video settings can help squeeze in a ton of FPS for most games. However, League of Legends doesn’t allow you to mess with your video settings from the client. You can only access these settings from inside the game. As such, we suggest that you create a custom game for yourself and then navigate over to the video settings once in-game.
- Click on the Play button on the top left
- Open the Create Custom tab
- Pick either Summoner’s Rift or Howling Abyss
- Pick the default Game Type and Spectator settings
- Click on Confirm and then Start Game
- Pick your Champion and wait for your custom game to launch
Note: The game type does not matter as we just want to access the video settings in peace. You can also launch Training mode instead of creating a Custom game to access the settings.
Video Settings
Once you’re in-game, press the ESC button on your keyboard and navigate to the Video tab in your settings. We’ve listed only the relevant settings here, so change them according to the following table:
| Name | Setting | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Resolution | Native/Screen Resolution | Determines the size of your windowed game. Lower resolution means higher FPS. |
| Window Mode | Windowed | Switches the game to windowed mode, which boosts FPS and helps multi-task. |
| Colorblind Mode | Enable | Improves the quality of colors. |
| Eye Candy | Hide | Disable some minor effects to boost performance. |
| Enable Screen Shake | Disable | Screen shake is an in-game impact effect and can cause frame stuttering, so turn it off. |
| Character Quality | Very Low | Changes the quality of detail on your character models. |
| Environment Quality | Very Low | Changes texture quality on bushes and terrain. |
| Effects Quality | Low/Medium | Changes the quality of particles and ability effects. Has an effect on gameplay smoothness. |
| Shadow Quality | Very Low | The quality of shading on characters, minions, and objects. |
| Frame Rate Cap | 30/60, depending on your machine. | The limit of FPS. To keep them smooth, try picking the setting that stays the most stable, as it is crucial in team fights. |
| Anti-Aliasing | Disable | It smooths over jagged edges to make models and objects look more natural. |
| Vertical Sync | Disable | Synchronizes your monitor’s refresh rate with the game you’re playing. Uses extra processing power. |
At the end of it, all your settings should ideally look like the image above for the lowest end of machines.
Slider Settings
However, if you have the performance to spare, you can try playing around with the handy little graphics slider. The slider has a bunch of preset settings that you can try applying until you reach your desired quality-to-performance ratio for playing League of Legends.
Since League of Legends is a low-requirement game, most computers can comfortably go for a balanced approach to their settings by keeping them at a Medium Low or just Medium.
Disabling HUD Elements
The more elements on your screen, the less FPS you’re able to muster out. Therefore, it’s advised to remove any HUD elements and animations from League’s settings. Navigate to your Interface Settings from the Options menu in-game:
The FPS change may seem minor, but for players who need every single FPS increase they can get, this may prove quite helpful.
Another neat thing you can do through the Interface Settings is to lower the HUD size using the topmost slider in this tab and setting it as low as possible. Just make sure that you can see the main HUD clearly.
Difference In Visuals
Comparing the images below, the drop in quality after tweaking the in-game settings is nothing so massive that it could ruin your experience. Most people will not be zooming in to play this game, so the changes are barely even noticeable. The only major change is the swap to windowed mode, and it’s not a bad one at all – you may swap to borderless if you prefer, but windowed is optimal.
The bare minimum players should strive for is to get a stable 60 FPS. This is because unstable FPS can lead to a lot of stuttering and input delay, leading to in-game mistakes.
General PC Tweaks
After you’re done updating the settings from inside the game, here are some pointers for things you can do outside the game to improve your system’s performance.
Update your Windows
Keeping your Windows updated to the latest version avoids any unnecessary bugs that may be preventing your PC from performing at its full potential.
- Head over to the Windows Search bar and open “Check for updates”
- Ensure you are currently on the latest version with no pending updates. If not, you’ll be prompted to update your Windows here
Disable Fullscreen Optimizations
While fullscreen optimizations help to amp up your PC’s performance when League of Legends is running in full screen mode, some players have reported FPS loss with it enabled. You can disable it and see the difference yourself:
- Right-click on your League of Legends icon and select Properties
- Head over to the Compatibility tab
- Check the Disable Fullscreen Optimizations option in order to disable it
Increase Game Priority
Increasing your game’s priority will tell your computer to run the game smoothly and prioritize it over other applications running in the background. Here’s how you can do that:
- Once you launch the game, open the Task Manager
- Open the Details tab and right-click on the League of Legends instance that is running. You can tell it’s different by the icon color
- From here, hover over the Set Priority option and set it to High
Close RAM Intensive Background Processes
Games like League of Legends require a certain amount of memory to run and can face serious FPS drops if background applications are hoarding all the available memory. That’s why it’s recommended to close any RAM-intensive processes running while you’re playing the game. You can check these from the Task Manager.
As you can see in the screenshot above, my browser and Discord seem to be using quite a bit of memory. Observe your own list of applications and processes and close the ones that seem to be consuming too much memory.
Wrapping Up
We hope this guide will prove useful to the people who have been struggling to get consistent performance and FPS in their games. With the help of these tweaks, you should be able to improve the smoothness of your gameplay experience significantly. We wish you all the best of luck in your journey playing League of Legends. See you guys on the rift!
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