Riot has taken to Reddit to answer the community’s concern regarding performance in Valorant.
The original post points to frame drops whenever they kill a bot in the practice range. A Riot team member going buy Koalifier on Reddit responded saying that the issue is most likely related to garbage collection,
“This issue is probably related to a sort of consequence of the game's architecture. We need to do something called "garbage collection" periodically, which is where we tell the game to kick out stuff that's loaded into memory that doesn't need to be there anymore. In normal modes, we force this to be done on the round resets so that it doesn't impact gameplay at all (which is also why you might see your graphs dipping when the round swaps over to a new one). This is why you might get this issue in the range but not in actual games.”
Another poster followed up regarding the team’s priority when it comes to performance. Koalifier responded that the team is currently looking at performance work which is taking some time to work out at this moment. Because of that, they don’t have anything they can immediately share with the community,
“However, we did recently spend a ton of time digging into the hitch on death that turned out to be related to the act rank triangles on death recap, and we also put in a good chunk of time to build out Nvidia Reflex support so that players can take advantage of the low latency mode that it provides.”