League of Legends is one of the most popular MOBAs to arrive on Mac, with thousands of players battling each other across the globe every day. However, Mac players suffer from one disadvantage compared to their Windows or Linux friends — smooth performance. Macs have fewer game-oriented video cards in beginner to intermediate models, which could mean lower frames per second (FPS) rate for many players.

You can be sure that in the middle of a gank, solo fight, or rax, every frame counts. Smooth performance can be the difference between landing a stun, using an item, or helping your teammates in a split second. So when the stakes are high, don’t let slow performance drag you down.

Why Is League Of Legends slow on my Mac?

League of Legends is one of the easier MOBAs to run, thanks to a lightweight graphics engine and a smart team of engineers at Riot games. However, the load on your Mac can become fairly high as the match progresses. Champions level up and have more skills. They earn more money and have more items. In a late-game group fight, your Mac is processing so many actions at once that it can bog down the framerate. On top of that, there is a heavy exchange of data between server and your device to keep everyone on the same page.

Between the infamous League of Legends slow motion bug and even some issues with League of Legends slow updates, optimizing your Mac is more important than ever to win your next game.

1. Disable shadows

One of the most demanding graphical components in the League of Legends engine is the shadow processing engine. It renders the shadow of every champion, tree, and blade of grass on the map, which then has to respond to the conditions around them, such as spells and changing light. To speed up League of Legends, the game stores most of the shadow assets and states in your video RAM (VRAM). The more VRAM you have, up to approximately 2 GB, the smoother your FPS. But disabling shadows completely in the Video options can increase your FPS and give you extra visibility on the map (with fewer distracting shadows). To access the Video options, simply press Esc and then select Video. While you’re in there, try setting the overall graphics quality to Very Low.

2. Close all other apps

League of Legends on Mac plays better when no other apps use valuable RAM and resources. Common culprits include Dropbox, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Google Drive. Closing these apps before you play will make available more RAM and processing power speeding up League of Legends. To identify and close any resource-hogging apps, simply follow these instructions:

  1. Launch Activity Monitor from Applications.
  2. Switch tabs to Memory and make a note of the apps at the top of the list.
  3. Switch tabs to the CPU and see what’s taking up processing power.
  4. Quit all the apps you don’t need by selecting them and choosing the Force Quit icon in the top-left corner.

If closing these apps didn’t seem to make an impact on speeding up your League of Legends, try restarting your Mac first for a clean wipe of RAM usage.

3. Repair corrupt game files

League of Legends, like other MOBAs, is updated very frequently for new champions, items, bug fixes, or balances. Unfortunately, over time, your game files can become corrupt due to an error in processing the new files upon each update. Occasionally, this can lead to FPS problems and slow performance. Thankfully, League of Legends has a built-in repair function that will fix any corrupted files:

  1. Run League of Legends.
  2. Click on the gear in the top right corner of the window.
  3. Click Initiate Full Repair.
  4. Wait for the repair function (it can take 5 minutes to over 30 minutes, depending on the corrupted files).

If in doubt, you can always try reinstalling League of Legends entirely to pull fresh new files from the install. 

4. Remove resource-heavy and temp files

While there are some good tips for speeding up League of Legends FPS in the game settings, some optimizations can only be done inside macOS. After being used for some time, your Mac becomes full of all kinds of useless files that consume your processor’s speed. But how to spot them?  

CleanMyMac is one of the best tools out there to help you optimize your Mac for gaming. It finds the files that slow you down so you can focus on landing that next stun.

Using CleanMyMac is easy:

  1. Download CleanMyMac (a free trial is available).
  2. Choose Performance in the left-side panel and click Scan.
  3. Review background and login items and remove unneeded ones.
  4. Click View All Tasks to see what else you can do to speed up your Mac.

Besides, feel free to use other scans from CleanMyMac that have to do with Cleanup, Protection, etc. Just hit Scan, and CleanMyMac will do all the work for you.

Now you’re ready to get back to the game! Remember to repeat the optimization process from time to time, whether you’re doing it manually or using a more convenient and thorough one-click solution from CleanMyMac.