Best Valorant settings for FPS and input lag (2026)

Valorant is easy to run, which is exactly why its settings attract so much folklore. Much of the "FPS boost" advice still going around was written for an engine the game no longer uses, or for options Riot has since removed.

This guide is for the game as it is now: Unreal Engine 5 since patch 11.02, still DirectX 11, with AMD Anti-Lag 2 since 12.09. Where the evidence is thin, we say so.

The short version

Fullscreen, Reflex on, VSync off in the game, the quality sliders low, and Vanguard’s security settings left alone.

Display mode: Fullscreen. NVIDIA Reflex: On, or On + Boost. VSync: off in the game. Material and Detail quality: Low. Texture quality: Medium, or Low on a card with little video memory. Vignette, Bloom, Distortion, Cast Shadows: Off. Multithreaded Rendering: On, if your processor has at least 8 threads.

On an AMD card, turn on Anti-Lag 2 in the game rather than the HYPR-RX profile in the driver. And whatever a guide tells you, do not switch off TPM, Secure Boot or Memory Integrity for frames: on Windows 11 Valorant will not start without the first two, and Riot increasingly asks for the third.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

A new engine, one setting gone, one added, and a menu that moved around.

Patch 11.02 (July 2025) moved the game from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. Independent tests found frame rates as high as before, because the game still renders through DirectX 11 and uses none of the expensive parts of the new engine: no Lumen, no Nanite, no ray tracing, no DLSS or FSR. Anti-aliasing is still MSAA or FXAA.

Patch 11.06 (September 2025) removed the Raw Input Buffer option. It is now always on, so any guide that tells you to toggle it is out of date.

Patch 12.07 (April 2026) redesigned the settings screens and regrouped the options. The names below follow the current menu; if a label reads slightly differently in your client, it is the same setting.

Patch 12.09 (May 2026) added AMD Anti-Lag 2. NVIDIA Reflex 2 Frame Warp, announced for Valorant in January 2025, has still not shipped.

Every video setting, and what it costs

Low where a setting costs frames and adds nothing you need, effects off.

Valorant video settings
Setting	Set it to	Why	What it costs
Display Mode	Fullscreen	Exclusive fullscreen skips the Windows compositor, the lowest-latency path in a DirectX 11 game.	Slower Alt+Tab.
Resolution	Your monitor’s native	Clarity. Lowering it only helps when the graphics card is the limit.	Nothing at native.
Max FPS Always	Off without G-SYNC or FreeSync. With them, a few frames under your refresh rate.	Uncapped with Reflex gives the lowest latency; a cap keeps variable refresh working.	Uncapped: tearing, heat and power.
FPS limits in menus, in the background, on battery	On	Saves heat and power when you are not playing.	Nothing in a match.
NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency	On, or On + Boost	Removes the queue of frames waiting for the graphics card. Boost keeps the card clocked up when the processor is the limit.	Boost: more power and heat.
AMD Anti-Lag 2	On (Radeon RX 5000 or newer, driver from 9 March 2026)	Riot: lower latency in certain GPU-bound situations.	Small and system dependent. One high-end test measured 0.16 ms.
Multithreaded Rendering	On, with at least 8 processor threads	Riot’s bar for it: 8 threads, 8 GB of RAM, 2 GB of video memory.	May do nothing on weaker processors. Test it.
Material Quality	Low	Relatively heavy for what it shows.	Simpler materials.
Texture Quality	Medium, or Low with little video memory	Light on performance.	Video memory.
Detail Quality	Low	Less clutter, more frames.	Visual detail.
UI Quality	Low or Medium	Minor either way.	Minor.
Vignette, Bloom, Distortion, Cast Shadows	Off	Effects only. Cast Shadows affects only your own model.	Nothing that matters in a match.
VSync	Off	It adds input lag. With G-SYNC or FreeSync, turn vertical sync on in the driver instead (next section).	Tearing without variable refresh.
Anti-Aliasing	MSAA 2x with headroom, otherwise FXAA	Cleaner edges.	MSAA costs graphics card time.
Anisotropic Filtering	4x	Sharper surfaces at an angle.	Small.
Improve Clarity	Off if you are short of frames	A contrast change that costs frames on some systems.	Measure it on yours.
Experimental Sharpening	Your preference	A sharper image.	Sources disagree. Measure it.
Raw Input Buffer	Gone	Removed in 11.06 and always on.	Nothing to set.

Labels as in the menu after patch 12.07. Riot did not publish the new names, so a word may differ in your client.

Reflex, Anti-Lag 2, G-SYNC and frame caps

Pick one of two setups, depending on whether your monitor has variable refresh.

The lowest latency, or a monitor without G-SYNC or FreeSync: V-Sync off everywhere, no frame cap, Reflex On. You will see tearing, and that is the price.

With G-SYNC: G-SYNC on and Vertical sync on in the NVIDIA App or Control Panel, V-Sync off in the game, Reflex On. Reflex then caps the frame rate just under your refresh rate on its own, about 138 FPS at 144 Hz and about 224 at 240 Hz. NVIDIA says this is slightly slower than running uncapped; in exchange the picture never tears.

With Reflex on, the driver’s Low Latency Mode does nothing: Reflex overrides it, so setting it to Ultra adds no gain.

On AMD: turn on Anti-Lag 2 in the game. It needs a Radeon RX 5000 card or newer and a driver from 9 March 2026 or later. Skip the HYPR-RX profile in the driver: it switches on Radeon Boost, which lowers the resolution while you move, and frame generation, which adds latency. The cap-under-refresh rule should carry over to FreeSync, but the published tests were done on G-SYNC.

Mouse: 1000 Hz polling or higher. NVIDIA measured up to 3 ms of extra delay at 125 Hz. Very high rates, 4 to 8 kHz, cost processor time.

Vanguard, TPM and Memory Integrity

Leave them on. On Windows 11 the game needs the first two, and Riot increasingly asks for the third.

TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are mandatory on Windows 11. Without them Vanguard stops the game with error VAN 9001. A guide that tells you to switch them off for performance is handing you a game that will not launch.

Memory Integrity (also called HVCI) is the one that shows up in "FPS boost" lists. It does cost something: about 2 to 5 per cent on average in published tests, and less on processors from roughly 2017 onwards. But Vanguard can now require it. Error VAN 9005 ties its use of virtualization-based security to TPM 2.0, and since late 2025 Riot can require Memory Integrity on accounts or machines whose setup looks too much like a cheater’s. Riot’s optional Vanguard On-Demand mode needs it on as well. Microsoft starts turning it on by default on eligible PCs from October 2026, though it leaves alone a PC where you switched it off yourself.

Our advice for a Valorant player is to keep it on. A few per cent is not worth a game that refuses to start.

Riot documents two specific problems, each with its own fix: blue screens naming vgk.sys on Intel 13th and 14th generation processors (update the BIOS and use Intel’s default power profile), and poor performance on some AMD systems with ASUS AI Suite 3 installed (remove AI Suite 3, or run the one command Riot gives for that case). Neither is a general tweak.

The Windows side

A few switches matter. Most of the rest is folklore.

Windows settings for Valorant
Windows setting	Our advice	Evidence
Game Mode	On, the default	Microsoft: it stops driver installs and restart prompts during a game.
Optimizations for windowed games	On	Moves older DirectX games in a window to a faster way of presenting frames. Matters if you play in windowed fullscreen.
Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling	Either	Microsoft says you should not notice a difference, and nobody has measured one in Valorant.
Power plan	Balanced, unless your own test says otherwise	High performance stops core parking. On AMD Ryzen X3D processors with two dies, Balanced together with Game Bar is what puts the game on the right cores.
Enhance pointer precision	Does not affect your aim	Valorant reads raw mouse input, which skips Windows pointer acceleration.
Memory Integrity	On	See the Vanguard section above.

Tweaks that do nothing, or worse

Out of date, never true, or a risk to your account.

"Toggle Raw Input Buffer." It was removed in 11.06.

"Disable TPM, Secure Boot or Vanguard for FPS." The game will not start on Windows 11.

"Disable Memory Integrity for 5 to 15 per cent." Measured costs are 2 to 5 per cent, and it may be required.

"Reflex On + Boost or Anti-Lag 2 cuts 15 to 30 ms." NVIDIA’s own figure is up to 15 per cent lower latency in processor-limited scenes. A high-end AMD test measured a difference of 0.16 ms.

"Unreal Engine 5 brought DLSS, FSR and DirectX 12." It did not. The game is still DirectX 11, with no upscaling.

"Multithreaded Rendering doubles your FPS." It helps on processors with enough threads and can do nothing on the rest.

Timer resolution tools. Since Windows 10 version 2004 one program can no longer change the timer resolution for the whole system, and there is no evidence they help in Valorant.

"Disable HPET" commands. Riot documents one command for one case, ASUS AI Suite 3 on AMD. As a general tweak it is folklore.

Driver "advantage" filters. Riot patched an exploit tied to specific NVIDIA settings in 12.09. Do not go looking for the next one.

How to check it worked

Change one thing at a time, and watch the low frames, not only the average.

In Video, then Stats, show Client FPS with CPU and GPU frame time as text. If the CPU number is the bigger one, your processor is the limit, and Reflex or Anti-Lag 2 will help less than the menus suggest.

For real numbers, use Intel PresentMon or CapFrameX and compare the 1% low frame rate, not only the average: the lows are the stutter you feel. Run the same route in the Range at least three times, a minute or more each, change one setting between runs, and test again after a big patch, because regressions happen. Patch 12.03 had one.

What Prospira does for you

The Windows side, explained and undoable, without touching what Vanguard checks.

The game menu is yours to set, and the table above is all it takes. The Windows side is where people get lost, and that is the part the Prospira Tweaking Utility does: Game Mode, windowed-game optimizations, GPU scheduling, Game Bar, mouse acceleration and the power plan, each explained before it runs, most undone in one click, with a restore point made before the first change. On a two-die Ryzen X3D processor, keep Game Bar on.

One honest warning. The app’s Advanced tab has a switch that turns Memory Integrity off, and the switch itself says Valorant stops working with it. If you play Valorant, leave it alone. The app’s BIOS tool needs Memory Integrity off while you use it, so turn it back on when you are done.

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