This is more of a cool little troubleshooting process I found than a specific issue with Apex and Launchy.
I started having consistent, noticeable spikes in frame times after the last Apex Legends patch installed. I’ve been pulling my hair out the last few weeks until I got the bright idea to use OBS to capture Apex, MSI Afterburner, and Process Lasso.
I looked for a spike in frame time + drop in GPU utilization, then went frame by frame to see what thread suddenly came alive in the “Active Processes” tab in Process Lasso.
Turns out there were quite a few, but Launchy stuck out. I killed it and the new, noticeable frame drops stopped.
I’m not sure why VLC has a ‘next frame’, but not ‘previous’ hotkey. I ended up switching to Da Vinci Resolve for more granular scrubbing control to see exactly which process activated around the frame spike.