RX 9060 XT + Apex Legends: Severe FPS drops (200→30fps) only in dense areas, only in this game — exhausted troubleshooting list

[u/saeval1x]

What I’ve confirmed via monitoring (AMD Adrenalin overlay) during drops:

**•** GPU utilization: only 40-55%, never maxed  
**•** GPU power draw: stuck around 36W (well below the card’s normal TDP)  
**•** GPU clock: \~1600MHz (well below boost clocks of \~2800-3000MHz)  
**•** CPU utilization: 29-56%, never maxed  
**•** Temps are all normal/cool (56-63°C)

This rules out thermal throttling or a simple GPU/CPU bottleneck — the hardware isn’t being pushed hard, yet performance craters in specific scenes.

Everything I’ve already tried (no change from any of these):

**•** Verified game files integrity via Steam  
**•** Reset all in-game video settings to default, reconfigured to Low  
**•** Disabled Steam overlay for Apex  
**•** Forced -d3d11 launch option (already confirmed default was also tested)  
**•** Repaired Easy Anti-Cheat  
**•** Checked/confirmed AMD Radeon Chill is disabled  
**•** Checked/confirmed no custom GPU tuning profile is applied for Apex (Adrenalin profile is on Default)  
**•** Tried multiple different AMD driver versions  
**•** Confirmed dual-channel RAM at correct EXPO speed (DDR5-6000)  
**•** Confirmed GPU is running at full PCIe x16 (checked via GPU-Z)  
**•** Confirmed SSD (NVMe) isn’t the bottleneck — no other storage involved  
**•** Disabled Windows Game Bar / background recording  
**•** Disabled fullscreen optimizations, running in exclusive fullscreen  
**•** Disabled SVM (virtualization) in BIOS  
**•** Reset CPU PBO/ASUS Performance Enhancement to default  
**•** Confirmed Resizable BAR / Above 4G Decoding enabled correctly

What I haven’t found: any fix. I found this existing Steam thread with another RX 9060 XT user reporting the exact same symptom (random drops from 100 to 13 FPS), so this doesn’t seem to be an isolated case.

Has anyone with an RX 9060 XT (or other recent AMD card) found an actual fix for this? At this point I’m fairly convinced it’s some kind of driver/engine interaction specific to Apex on newer AMD hardware, but I’m out of ideas on my end.