Valorant FPS Drop Fix: 6 Real Steps That Actually Work

Valorant’s supposed to run on almost anything, so an FPS drop feels personal. We tested an impact-ranked fix order on several Windows 11 PCs, including a GTX 1660 Super, an RTX 2060, and an Iris Xe laptop. Most lost frames came back before we touched a setting.

#Why Is My Valorant FPS Dropping?

The game itself rarely changes. Valorant runs on a custom Unreal Engine 4 build with modest hardware floors, so when FPS drops on a machine that was happy yesterday, the cause is something around the game: a stale GPU driver, a Windows power state, a background overlay, or Vanguard re-handshaking with the kernel after an update.

Order matters. People grab the settings panel first and stop when something seems to work — that hides the real culprit further up the stack. Riot’s official Valorant support page confirms that step 1 of any FPS troubleshooting is updating to a current GPU driver, before any in-game setting changes. In our testing across all 3 rigs, settings tinkering helped a little, the driver update helped a lot, and the power plan helped more than expected on the laptop.

If the drop arrived suddenly, the trigger is almost always 1 of 3 events: a Windows feature update landed overnight, Valorant patched, or NVIDIA / AMD pushed a new driver. The fix order below covers all three.

#Update Your GPU Driver First

This is the highest-impact single move, and the one most guides bury at the bottom. Open NVIDIA’s official GeForce driver download page or AMD’s Radeon driver download page, pick your card, and install the current Game Ready or WHQL driver. GeForce Experience or AMD Adrenalin surface the same driver, but the “you’re up to date” badge can be days behind.

The NVIDIA stack controls GPU scheduling and the overlay hooks; we cover what the NVIDIA backend process does separately. AMD’s equivalent stack does the same job.

Sanity-check the driver isn’t failing in a louder way. A drop that ends in a black screen is usually a thread stuck in device driver crash. A stutter that bluescreens is often the video scheduler internal error. Either pattern means a clean driver reinstall, not just an update.

After the install, reboot. The new driver doesn’t fully take over the GPU scheduling path until the next cold boot, and we found that some of our test machines only recovered the lost frames after that restart, not immediately after the driver finished installing.

#Switch Windows to High Performance Power Plan

This is the second-highest-impact move. On the Iris Xe laptop it was the biggest single jump we saw. Windows ships Balanced by default, and Balanced throttles the CPU whenever it judges the workload “light”, which Valorant’s low CPU floor can trip into. Microsoft’s official power plan documentation states that the built-in High Performance plan disables CPU parking and holds the processor at higher P-states, both of which matter for a CPU-light, latency-sensitive game.

Open Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options and pick High Performance. On Windows 11 the GUI sometimes hides the option. Open an elevated Command Prompt and run powercfg /setactive 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c to force the built-in plan.

On a laptop, plug it in. The thermal envelope tightens on battery no matter what plan is active. If you must play on battery, set the Windows Graphics setting for VALORANT-Win64-Shipping.exe to High Performance under Settings → System → Display → Graphics, which forces the discrete GPU when Windows would punt the game to integrated.

The desktops gained less than the laptop, but neither lost anything. On the GTX 1660 Super the average felt steadier in long rounds.

#Which Valorant Settings Actually Give You More FPS?

The settings panel is bigger than it needs to be. Most sliders cost almost nothing on default. Two settings matter. A third matters only if you’re VRAM-limited.

Multithreaded Rendering ON. This is the in-game switch with the biggest FPS return. Off, the renderer is single-threaded and leaves most CPU cores idle while one does everything. On, it parallelizes across cores. On any modern CPU, leave it on.

Shadows = Low. Shadow rendering is the biggest visual setting hit. Medium or High to Low gives back real frames on integrated graphics, older NVIDIA cards, and AMD APUs. Low to Off saves very little extra and removes a competitive cue. You can sometimes spot a player by their shadow.

Anti-Aliasing off is a cheap win on Intel iGPUs and older GPUs, so disable it there. On RTX 30-series and newer it costs almost nothing on MSAA 2x.

Texture Quality only matters if you’re VRAM-bound. With at least 4 GB of GPU memory free in-match (open Task Manager → Performance → GPU and check the Dedicated GPU memory graph mid-round), leave it on High. Dropping it without that data costs visual clarity for zero FPS recovery on most cards we tested, and you only need to lower it if the graph stays pinned at the top.

Valorant sits in the wider tactical-FPS category where the same setting philosophy applies; see games like Counter-Strike for the same logic across the genre.

#Close Background Apps and Overlays That Drag Frames Down

Every overlay hooks into the render pipeline. Every hook costs frames. Disable overlays first; uninstall the app only if disabling doesn’t help.

Disable in this order:

• Discord: User Settings → Game Overlay → off.
• Xbox Game Bar: Settings → Gaming → Xbox Game Bar → off, plus Captures.
• GeForce Experience: Settings → In-Game Overlay → off. NVIDIA renamed it “NVIDIA App Overlay” in late 2024, but the toggle is the same.
• Steam: Settings → In-Game → uncheck the Steam Overlay.
• Razer Synapse: Customize → Overlay → off. If Synapse won’t open and you suspect interference, see our Razer Synapse not opening walkthrough.

Then close the background apps you don’t need while playing. Chrome with 30 tabs and a video autoplaying costs real CPU and RAM bandwidth. So does OBS recording, or a backup utility scanning your drive. Task Manager → Processes, sorted by CPU then Memory, shows what to close.

One related Windows aim setting worth toggling off is enhance pointer precision in Windows, the standard recommendation for any FPS where aim consistency matters.

#Fullscreen vs Borderless and the Post-Update Stutter

Valorant has 3 display modes: Fullscreen, Windowed Fullscreen (Borderless), and Windowed. For FPS recovery the answer is Fullscreen.

Fullscreen owns the GPU’s swap chain, so frames go straight to the display. Borderless looks identical but routes every frame through Windows’ Desktop Window Manager, which composites it with everything else on your desktop first. DWM compositing costs GPU time and adds latency. Pick borderless only if you stream and need OBS to capture without a fullscreen handoff.

The other case is the post-update stutter. If your FPS was fine yesterday and Valorant now stutters after an overnight Windows update, that’s almost always Vanguard. A Windows update changes the kernel surface, and the first boot afterward can leave Vanguard half-loaded.

The fix is mechanical. Reboot, wait for Vanguard’s tray shield to appear, then launch the game. If the stutter’s gone, you’re done. If not, uninstall Vanguard from Settings → Apps → Riot Vanguard → Uninstall and launch Valorant — the launcher reinstalls Vanguard cleanly, and we hit this exact case on the RTX 2060 after a 24H2 cumulative.

#Bottom Line

Update the GPU driver, switch Windows to High Performance, flip Multithreaded Rendering on, and drop Shadows to Low. Those 4 moves close the gap.

#Frequently Asked Questions