While VALORANT’s minimum spec is quite generous for low-end PCs, agents like Viper and Astra are really pushing the spec sheet to its limit.
The minimum spec sheet of a game lets players know if their system can handle certain games. VALORANT was developed from the ground up to be really friendly towards PCs with low-end hardware similar to League of Legends.
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Following recent meta changes, Viper and Astra became must-pick agents for certain maps. Unlike other agents, Viper and Astra’s kits are really flashy and resource-intensive. Consequently, when these abilities are being activated at the same time, it is affecting these low-end PCs negatively.
Many VALORANT players have reported to Riot Games that they are getting low FPS than before. In response, Riot Games stated that they are currently working on optimizing the abilities of agents like Viper and Astra.
“We’ve identified issues with Viper and Astra and will be working on optimizations to their abilities over the next few patches. We will be doing a pass on performance for all Agent abilities over the coming months.“, Brian Fischer, Performance Engineer at Riot Games.
More CPU related optimization is coming
Aside from agent-specific optimizations, Riot is also focusing more on improving CPU performance. According to Riot, most VALORANT players are CPU-bound. Meaning further CPU-based optimization could improve performance for low-end hardware.
Also, they are working on better utilization of multithreaded processing to take advantage of the power of modern CPUs. Recently, Riot even pushed back a patch by a week in order to perform some game engine optimization.
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Riot says stable performance for all sorts of PCs is their main priority moving forward. And in the upcoming patches, they are going to roll out more performance-focused changes.
