RiotArkem

The geometry isn't free but in general the scene has many thousands of polygons visible so adding a handful more shouldn't impact performance noticeably.

We've been working on CPU optimizations and hopefully some of them will be ready for the next patch but nothing has been finalized yet.

We have a temp fix that'll come in the next patch (we added some actual geometry to these abilities) and a proper fix coming in one of the two patches after that (nvidia gave us some helpful suggestions for this).

This sounds like a mistake (or your friend isn't being completely honest) feel free to have them send me a reddit message with their username and I'll review their case.

I don't have an ETA but I'm definitely interested in having feedback for cheating bans. At the very least I want the players that reported the cheater to know that a punishment was given but if I can I'd also like to notify the people who played with the cheater.

I'd like us to find a way to undo the damage done by cheaters but we haven't figure out a good approach yet let alone scheduled the work. So it's probably not coming soon.

We've been talking about reverting competitive games but we have concerns about the inaccuracy from a revert being worse than the inaccuracy from playing with cheaters. To revert the matches accurately we'd probably need to recalculate the MMR of most other matches but there might be an acceptable shortcut that we can use.

I don't want to steal anyone's thunder but I think there'll be more information coming this week.

You're not wrong! Sometimes it isn't a priority, some projects just don't really care about CPU performance.

Everything is a trade off so it's not too surprising that my hypothetical dating sim isn't trying out new tech to try and use all cores and get to 1000fps. Big name cinematic console games are also happy running at 30fps (though these are normally GPU bound so they're preferring higher resolutions over high frame rates).

In fact one reason we don't see more progress in multi-core computation for games is that most modern games are limited by GPU power rather than CPU power. Spreading the game work over multiple CPUs might not even help the frame rate if you're stuck waiting for the GPU to do its thing.

In most games changing your graphics settings will have a massive impact on your frame rate, this generally means that the GPU is the limiting factor. It's actually rare to have a game like VALORANT where the graphics settings don't actually do a lot ...

The industry is getting there but it's hard because there's a lot of state in a video game and each object that needs to be updated is often dependent on a lot of other objects.

Modern engines are building task dependency graph systems that let subsystems updated independently from each other on different threads but for many engines these subsystems aren't first class citizens and a lot of programming effort is required to get them working.

To process a frame you generally have to read network updates from the server, read input from the player, use this information to update the state of each game object, prepare a list of things to be rendered and send that list to the graphics card.

You can add some threads here, for example you often have a input polling thread and a network packet handling thread (checking for input/messages etc). There's also often a rendering thread that is responsible for shuffling objects to the graphics card when they're ready to...

Can you tell me what version of Vanguard you have?

(Go to "C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard" and right click on vgc.exe, select properties and then go to the details tab)

Looks like a server error on our side, I'll escalate it to our infrastructure people.

That link 404s for me :(

Vanguard didn't update along with 0.50 (it updated last week on its own) so it's probably not a 0.50 specific issue.

Is this still happening? Vanguard shouldn't be blocking drivers since last week.

Another copy paste from above:

If you upload your Vanguard logs somewhere (they live in "C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard\Logs") and message me a link I'll take a look.

My best guess is some sort of connection issue to our anti-cheat servers?

Copy-pasted from the last person who reported this bug:

If you upload your Vanguard logs somewhere (they live in "C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard\Logs") and message me a link I'll take a look.

My best guess is some sort of connection issue to our anti-cheat servers?

It's probably a coincidence since nothing Vanguard related changed in this game patch (Vanguard updates on its own schedule). Let me know if it keeps happening though.

If you upload your Vanguard logs somewhere (they live in "C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard\Logs") and message me a link I'll take a look.

My best guess is some sort of connection issue to our anti-cheat servers?

The reason the game frame rate isn't heavily reliant on GPU performance is that we took some extreme measures during the development of the game to keep all the art performant (art style, polygon/texture/bone budgets, etc).

On the CPU side there are many contributing factors, there's no one thing that's the problem. That said, the biggest outlier right now is probably that our UI isn't very optimized (partly because it was one of the last things to get built). This is one area that we're spending a lot of time on at the moment looking for improvements.

Some of the other reasons include Unreal Engine being relatively single threaded unless you put a lot of work into it (so it only uses a couple of cores fully by default). Another factor that's more this game specific is the high tick rate of the servers which leads to a lot of processing of incoming and outgoing packets. Likewise there are several simplifying assumptions that some games can make that we don't due to...

a support ticket is a good place!

For most players the limiting factor on your frame rate will be single threaded CPU performance. Unfortunately most of the settings in the game impact GPU utilization so don't end up making a lot of difference to game performance.

We're working on it though, next patch will see some improvements and the next couple of patches will make it better again. The game will probably remain CPU bound for the foreseeable future but we do want to remove frame drops and improve the frame rate on high end gaming PCs.

The security change that was causing performance issues has been well and truly fixed... but there were several other changes that have slipped in causing performance to regress.

Right now we've increased the number of people working on performance issues and so we've got some improvements coming in the next patch. We're also identifying and planning out longer term work to improve performance, especially on high end computers.

It's hard to say for sure but I expect that performance after this next patch will be similar to the performance of the first beta version and then the patch after that should be overall better. (Your mileage may vary, this is just an estimate, etc, etc)

Yes, Vanguard's aggression was significantly decreased yesterday.

https://twitter.com/PlayVALORANT/status/1258493180510519296