Recently, Apex Legends was reported to have an "incompatibility" issue with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card.
The official Apex Legends account, ApexCommunityJP, posted on X: "We have confirmed that players using the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card are experiencing game crashes and are currently investigating the cause."
When PC Gamer attempted to launch Apex Legends on a PC equipped with an RX 9070 XT graphics card, the game did indeed crash. They received a "fatal error" from the game/engine: "The application's device failed due to badly formed commands sent by the application. This is a design-time issue that should be investigated and fixed."
The official Apex Legends Twitter account suggested that players try rolling back their AMD graphics drivers, but some players appear to have already tried this without resolving the issue.
However, a suggestion in the social media replies seems to be effective: add the following to the game's Steam launch options: "+staticprop_color_use_bindless 0 +staticprop_depth_use_bindless 0 +r_drawworld_depth_bindless 0".
To do this, go to the game's Steam page, click the gear icon, select "Properties," and then paste these commands into the launch options.
These options seem to be related to bindless rendering, which allows the GPU to access shaders directly without CPU intervention. These commands appear to disable this new technology, which may result in some performance loss.
After adding these commands to the game's launch options, the game launches and runs smoothly, so it appears to be effective.
Of course, this is only a temporary solution, and we can only hope that AMD or Respawn Entertainment will provide a more thorough and permanent fix. It is currently unclear what causes the crash and what measures can or will be taken, so we will have to keep a close eye on future updates.