League of Legends low FPS or capped FPS bug

League of Legeds logo on a speedmeter

How to fix your framerate in League of Legends

League of Legends is an old game, so newer computers should have no problem running the game, right? Not at all! There is a lot of issues that can happen even with a newer graphic card and hardware when playing games originally made for less powerful hardware.

One of the first things you should do when your FPS isn't as high as it should be, or you are having problems with the game, is to take a look on the official page for this kind of issue, you can take a look at League of Legends support for more details.

Over this article, we will take a look at common problems and the usual fix for them, keep in mind that what works for someone else may not work for you.

FPS is too low on League of Legends or frames are dropping

If your game is running very slow it is due to low FPS(frames per second) it means your computer can't keep up with the game, one of the first things to get out of the list is your graphics card driver, you need to make sure that your driver is updated and you are using the latest one, some hardware may have multiple drivers available for them, which is the case for AMD, they offer you a driver mainly for stability for software and such, and a driver more focused in gaming.

Update your graphics card driver

To update your graphics card driver you can open its software if it is installed and check for updates, if you don't have your graphics card software installed(what is very bad), you can download it by going to the manufacturer website, you need to download the correct driver for your GPU model.

Below is the place where you can download drivers for NVIDIA and AMD:

  • For NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
  • For AMD: https://www.amd.com/en/support

The support linked above has all the instructions on finding your graphic card model and getting the driver.

Best performance settings for League of Legends

Running the game at low graphics settings will help in case you always get a low FPS and your computer is already a bit old, so it makes sense that it is getting low frames in the game.

Unfortunately, it appears that League won't easily show you all the video settings until you get into a game, so first, you have to open the game, create a custom game just for yourself, or just enter any game if you want to. Heading over to training and practice is a good way to start a quick game just to troubleshoot your FPS, changing graphics settings inside of a game may end badly if it ends in a crash or something related.

Inside the game press ESC and go on the video tab, here make these adjust:

  • Resolution: Your monitor resolution, only in an extreme case you should reduce it to attempt to increase FPS.
  • Window mode: Fullscreen or borderless, you want to avoid window mode cause it may give the game less priority over other processes running in the background.
  • Character quality, environmental quality, and effects quality: Very low
  • Shadow quality: Off
  • Character inking: Unchecked
  • Framerate cap: Either uncapped or 60 FPS(or higher if your monitor supports it), I really recommend not using uncapped as you won't notice a difference and it will preserve your computer resources
  • Anti-aliasing and wait for vertical sync: Both unchecked
  • (optional) Interface: uncheck animated related options

There is no secret over these settings and they are probably the recommended low settings for the game, other settings worth taking a look at are the settings in your graphics card driver, as they are very specific for each driver I will just leave that here as a mention, you can easily take a look on what are the best settings for your driver online.

League of Legends FPS capped at 15 or randomly drops

This is another issue, different than what is mentioned above if you suddenly experience a performance drop with no hardware change(and without a lot of new applications opened), that happens randomly in certain games it is more likely a driver issue, there is an easy way to fix that however it only works during the match where your FPS bugged and it may come back, I really suspect it is due to overlays made by the graphics card drivers or some other issue related to them if I'm not correct.

To attempt the easy fix for the capped FPS bug, press ESC and go into the video tab, click on the resolution and set it to a lower resolution than the current one(just to avoid issues in setting to a higher one), that should instantly fix it, then you can change it back to what it was before if you want. Another fix commonly reported is simply pressing alt-tab and going back to the game, if you know anything else about this bug reach us out and the article will be updated.

The game still crashes or has low FPS

If the game still isn't running as it should:

  • Clean your PC in case it is overheating
  • Try running the game without an antivirus installed
  • Close all other applications that may cause the issue
  • Identify a bottleneck in your setup and upgrade it
  • Repair the League client(rarely will help)
  • Make sure the game is slow due to low FPS and we aren't talking about a slow connection
  • Disable all in-game sounds
  • Contact League of Legends support or your graphics card support

After all, contacting the support will avoid headaches and a lot of troubleshooting work after you already ruled out things that could be happening.

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