Riot discusses performance in their latest Ask Valorant series in which they field questions from the Valorant community.
If you’ve played Valorant recently on a lower end PC, you may have noticed potential inconsistency with performance. Riot explains that lower end machines most often have a GPU bottleneck which, rather obviously, will have an impact on your performance.
However, higher end PCs may have a CPU bottleneck, thus making your PC CPU-bound. As Riot notes, they have a full team dedicated to maintaining and improving performance in Valorant. They write,
“Maintaining performance involves setting budgets (data, not finances) for new content that is added to the game, such as maps, characters, and modes—as well as monitoring client and server performance internally across a variety of specs prior to a patch, and externally once a patch is released. This allows us to either catch an issue before release or, in the worst case, track down issues that you are experiencing in the live game.”
They go on to state they are focused on improving CPU performance in Valorant. They also note Viper and Astra will receive optimizations over several patches to increase the lowest framerate to create more stability.
You can read the full Ask Valorant here. In a previous Ask Valorant, Riot dove into smurfing and what they intend to do to combat smurfing in Valorant. If you missed that community update, you can catch up here. Additionally, confusion arose last month after a recent update added HRTF audio to the game. Some thought HRTF was lowering the overall game volume. However, Riot came out and explained that it does not do so.
