Most first-person shooters, like Valorant, value frames per second or FPS. High FPS ensures that your game runs smoothly and feels like it. Low FPS can make your game feel sluggish and sometimes even drop to very low FPS, where you might miss a frame where your enemy appeared. Low FPS and FPS drops can be detrimental to your gaming experience.
If you feel like your FPS has been stopping you from unleashing the Tenz within you, then go through our methods of fixing your low FPS.
Also read: When Can You Surrender in VALORANT?
Fix 1. Update Your Drivers
We’ll start with the most basic checks. If it has not been updated for quite some time, updating your graphics driver can be a significant boost to your FPS in Valorant. The latest graphics drivers often have fixed and improved game performance, making them mandatory if you are playing Valorant often.
There should be a utility program for your graphics card that allows you to check and install updates (NVIDIA Control Panel or AMD Software). After updating your drivers, check if your game gets better FPS. If not, then proceed to the next fix.
Fix 2. Adjust Your Game Settings
Sometimes, the game might have incorrectly configured your graphics settings, so you will have to adjust these settings by yourself manually. These settings are also reliant on the power of your graphics card, so you need to take that into account when changing these settings.
Go to Settings in Valorant, navigate to Video, then Graphics Quality. For starters, you can set them to these:
- Material Quality: Low
- Texture Quality: Low
- Detail Quality: Low
- UI Quality: Low
- Vignette: Off
- VSync: Off
- Anti-Aliasing: None
- Anisotropic Filtering: 1x
- Improve Clarity: Off
- Enhanced Gun Skin Visuals (First Person): Off
- Distortion: Off
- Shadows: Off
These settings, as you can tell, will set your game to the lowest possible graphics settings, which can theoretically lessen the load on your graphics card and allow it to pump more FPS and performance to Valorant. If these settings fix your FPS issues, you can then freely adjust each setting and test them to get the right balance of visual quality and performance that works for you.
Another setting that you can tweak is Limit FPS, found in Video > General. There are four options for limiting FPS. You can try turning all of them off so that Valorant can get to push as much FPS as your machine can handle.
Also read: How To Type to All Players in Valorant?
Fix 3. Tweak Your Windows Settings
Maybe after all these fixes that you’ve done, the main culprit is your operating system. Luckily, there are settings that you can tweak in your Windows 10 machine so that you can get the most FPS out of it.
First, navigate to your Valorant game files. It should be at the following location: C:\Riot Games\VALORANT\live\ShooterGame\Binaries\Win64. Inside this folder, you should find a file named “VALORANT-Win64-Shipping.exe.” Right-click on this file, then click on Properties.
On the window, click on the Compatibility tab, and then check the option for “Disable fullscreen optimizations.” Press Apply to confirm the changes.
Next, go to your Start menu and search for “Game Mode settings.” You can also find this by going to Settings > Gaming > Game Mode. Click the slider for Game Mode, which should disable Game Mode. Game Mode might interfere with how Valorant runs, so you might see an improvement if you turn it off.
Lastly, you might also want to check for updates in Windows. Some known issues might have affected Valorant, and the latest updates often fix these issues. Of course, this means that you might have to wait out until the update finishes.
More Settings to Check
Some people report that Valorant may perform differently in Windowed mode and Fullscreen mode. To change the mode, you will need to go to Video > General > Display Mode. You can see which of the available modes work better with you by testing each one out. You can also press F11 to change display modes while in the game.
Alternatively, some people have reported that pressing F11 twice from Fullscreen mode (going to Windowed mode then reverting to Fullscreen mode) has fixed their FPS issues. You can do this, too, and see if it improves your FPS.
Additionally, many software might have some overlays that can affect your Valorant performance. Although we cannot list all of them here, some prominent ones include NVIDIA, AMD (Instant Replay), Discord, and streaming programs. You will want to go through each software and disable them to see which ones are causing you to have low FPS.
Get that FPS
FPS is critical in Valorant, as it allows you to see more crucial information, like seeing an enemy peek ever so slightly at a corner. If you have good FPS, you will not miss such details and will improve your gaming experience.
