For a competitive shooter like Valorant, smooth gameplay is essential. Yet many players encounter low FPS, stuttering, or sudden drops, especially after large patches—like Riot’s recent move to Unreal Engine 5 in 2025. Whether you’re on budget hardware or a high-end rig, there are proven steps to stabilize and boost performance.
Optimize In-Game Video Settings
The fastest way to improve FPS is to lower Valorant’s in-game graphics.
Pro players recommend these settings for a balance of visibility and performance:
- Display Mode: Fullscreen (ensures exclusive GPU control)
- Material, Texture, Detail, UI Quality: Low
- Vignette, Bloom, Distortion, Shadows: Off
- Anti-Aliasing: None or MSAA 2x
- Anisotropic Filtering: 1x
- VSync: Off
- Multithreaded Rendering: On
- NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: On + Boost (if supported)
These adjustments can deliver instant improvements, often raising FPS by 30–50% without reducing competitive clarity.
Adjust Windows and Driver Settings
Your operating system and GPU drivers play a major role in Valorant’s stability. Small tweaks here can make a noticeable difference:
- Set Windows power plan to High Performance.
- Update GPU drivers (NVIDIA/AMD) regularly to avoid incompatibility after game patches.
- In Task Manager, set Valorant’s priority to High.
- In GPU control panels:
- Set texture filtering to Performance.
- Disable vertical sync.
- For AMD users, disable Radeon Instant Replay and overlays, which can quietly drain FPS.
Close Background Programs and Overlays
Background software often causes hidden performance loss. Overlays in particular are FPS killers:
- Disable overlays from Discord, GeForce Experience, Xbox Game Bar, and Steam. Each can cost between 5–15 FPS. Disabling them all may recover as much as 40 FPS.
- Close browsers, streaming software, and unnecessary apps before launching the game.
Maintain Riot Vanguard and Game Files
Valorant relies on Riot Vanguard, its anti-cheat system, to run properly. Corruption or misconfiguration here can drag down performance:
- If you experience persistent FPS drops after updates, try a clean reinstall of both Valorant and Riot Vanguard.
- Check that the “vgc” service is running under Windows services. If it’s disabled, FPS can plummet.
Check Hardware and System Specs
Not all FPS issues are software-related. Valorant’s recommended specs have increased with the engine upgrade:
- OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit
- CPU: Intel i3-4150 / Ryzen 3 1200 or higher
- RAM: 4 GB minimum
- GPU: GeForce GT 730 / Radeon R7 240 or better
If your hardware falls below these thresholds, even optimizations may not prevent stuttering. In such cases, a CPU or GPU upgrade may be the only long-term solution, especially after the Unreal Engine 5 update.
The Bottom Line
Fixing FPS in Valorant requires a layered approach: lower in-game settings, disable overlays, optimize system and driver configurations, and ensure Riot Vanguard runs smoothly. For most players, these steps restore stability and raise frame rates significantly. And for those on outdated hardware, an upgrade may be the only way to keep up with Valorant’s evolving engine.
Written by:
Christian