Optimal Graphics Settings for Valorant (2024): A Performance Guide

Valorant (by Riot Games) remains one of the most popular eSports games on the planet. Its daily active player count of 5-6 million puts other competitive shooters like Counter-Strike 2 (1.3M) and PUBG (700K) to shame. While Valorant is well-optimized on PC, requiring a paltry dual-core CPU and onboard graphics for 900p 30 FPS, running the game at 1440p 240 FPS or higher can be tricky. Here’s a guide detailing the performance impact of each graphics setting at different levels. We’ll recommend the optimal graphics settings for playing Valorant on PC in 2024 at: 60 FPS, 144 FPS, and 240 FPS at 1440p, 4K, and even 8K.

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

• Enable Resizable BAR.
• Turn on Game Mode.
• Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
• Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
• Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
• Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
• Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
• Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Valorant: PC System Requirements

Testing Methodology

• All the graphics settings were set to the highest at a resolution of 8K UHD (7680 × 4320).
• The benchmarks were conducted on the “Fracture” map with unlimited abilities enabled.
• Overview of Contents:
  1. Resolution scaling.
  2. Model quality & texture filtering.
  3. Lighting & reflection quality.
  4. Shadows & ambient occlusion.
  5. Atmospherics & tessellation.
  6. Frame generation.
  7. VRAM usage.
  8. CPU bottlenecks.
  9. Optimal graphics settings for Valorant (PC).
• Hardware setup used:
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
  • Cooler: Lian Li Galahad 360 AIO.
  • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
  • Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E Carbon WiFi.
  • Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.

Valorant: Resolution Scaling

Valorant is heavily CPU-bound at 1080p and 1440p. The framerates were higher at the latter than the former, with 4K not being far behind. We recorded an average of 697.5 FPS at 1080p, 666 FPS at 1440p, and 620 FPS at 4K. The framerates plummeted to 160 FPS at 8K.

Shadows, Distortion & Bloom

Valorant lets you completely disable in-game shadows. These highly performant, low-resolution shadows reduce the average framerates by 2 FPS or 1% at 8K. Similarly, the bloom shader has a negligible impact on performance, only slightly boosting lows.

Disabling distortion doesn’t improve the averages, but grants a sizable 9% boost to the 1% lows. This is likely due to the player’s “Ultimate” ability.

Sharpening & Clarity

Valorant features two image-sharpening shaders, one similar to AMD’s CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening), and the other resembling the SweetFX/ReShade “clarity” shader. These settings improve texture sharpness at the cost of an unreasonable 20-30% drop in average framerates.

Anti-aliasing & Texture Filtering

Valorant offers rather primitive anti-aliasing options in the form of multi-sampling (MSAA) and fast approximate AA (FXAA). The former is a massive drain on performance, while the latter doesn’t work well with temporal aliasing.

The in-game anisotropic texture filtering subtly improves distant object detail at an unnoticeable loss in average performance.

Valorant: Textures & VRAM Usage

Valorant has a reasonably modest VRAM usage, ranging from 4 GB at 1080p/1440p “High” to 5 GB at 4K UHD. Increasing the resolution to 8K UHD ups the graphics memory consumption to 11 GB. The impact on average framerates is minimal versus “Medium,” while “Low” is marginally faster.

Detail & Material Quality

Detail quality adjusts the number of on-screen objects, including vegetation, sand, pebbles, decals, and other weathering effects. It minimally impacts performance and is best left at high.

Material quality is similar to ambient occlusion, adding self-contained shadowing to the game world, and improving 3D depth at a negligible performance cost.

UI quality adjusts the transparency and visibility of the game UI and doesn’t have a meaningful impact on performance.

Valorant: CPU Bottlenecks & Multi-Threaded Rendering

Valorant is mostly CPU-bound than the other way around. We observed a GPU-Busy deviation of 8% at 4K “High” which is still quite balanced. At 1440p and 1080p, the deviation increases to 43% and 60% as the game pumps over 600 FPS on average.

Multi-threaded rendering can drastically improve performance at 1080p and 1440p. However, if you’re playing at 4K, you might want to disable it. In certain GPU-bound scenarios, the game runs better in single-threaded mode as the CPU attains higher clock speeds versus multi-threaded.

Valorant: Performance Summary

Optimal Graphics Settings for Valorant: 144 FPS & 240 FPS

Full-resolution image comparisons.