AMD's latest Adrenalin Edition 26.8.1 driver appears to be causing crashes in Apex Legends for players running the Radeon RX 9070 XT. The game's developer has confirmed it is investigating the issue.
The acknowledgement came from the official Japanese Apex Legends community account on X, which advised affected players to roll back to the previous Adrenalin Edition 26.7.1 driver as a workaround.
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That said, user reports suggest that Adrenalin Edition 26.6.1 is currently the most stable option for affected RX 9070 XT owners. This points toward a driver-level issue rather than something specific to the game or GPU hardware. Players who cannot or do not want to roll back their driver have another workaround. A community-discovered Steam launch option turns off bindless rendering, which appears to be at the centre of the conflict.
+staticprop_color_use_bindless 0 +staticprop_depth_use_bindless 0 +r_drawworld_depth_bindless 0
Players can add the above commands by clicking the cog icon on Apex Legends' Steam page, selecting Properties, and pasting the commands into the launch options field. Turning off bindless rendering may have a minor performance impact, but affected players have reported that it allows the game to boot and run normally.
The crashes come less than a month into Apex Legends Season 30, also known as Marked, which introduced several new features and improvements to the game. AMD's 26.8.1 release notes do not list Apex Legends as a known issue. However, they do document a separate crash affecting Starfield on Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs with the same driver.
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For now, both AMD and Respawn are investigating, and players will be hoping the next driver update brings a proper fix rather than another workaround.
