[2020] Is this game going to be optimized when it launches?

We have a bunch of developers grinding on performance. Some performance work will land in the launch patch. Additional performance work will land in future patches. We will continue to patch the game regularly; launch is just the beginning.

There's a bunch of different factors impacting performance. It's useful to think about bottlenecks: what is currently the slowest part of the game? Removing that bottleneck improves framerate until you hit the next slowest piece. Then you optimize that piece, then the next, and so forth. The slowest piece is different depending on scenario (ex. shooting a gun, running around the world, lots of abilities firing) and depending on hardware (i.e. how fast is your CPU vs. GPU). The pieces also change as we add and update content and behaviors.

Sadly there's not currently just one chunky piece that we can fix to unlock dramatic improvements. We're working on a bunch of different pieces that each unlock fractions of a millisecond every frame. Combined these optimizations add up to more FPS.

On older machines VALORANT's performance tends to be constrained by GPU. The game's overall performance on these machines scales directly with the quantity and complexity of what it has to render. We can make these configurations perform better with optimizations like reducing the number of objects in a scene or simplifying the GPU computations required to compute the color of each pixel.

On newer machines the game is usually constrained by CPU speed. These machines tend to have GPUs that can handle our rendering demands faster than our CPU demands. Framerate scales inversely with the amount of work the game has to do to update the simulation (ex. a bunch of stuff happens when you fire a weapon) and the time it takes to send the GPU all the information it needs to render the scene (ex. data about everything the player can currently see). Improving these configurations requires reducing this work or parallelizing it across additional cores.

We're doing work on all of these fronts at the same time.

In the 0.50 patch we made several small optimizations to CPU costs and larger optimizations to GPU costs (particularly on Split). We discovered a defect that caused the GPU to have to work harder than it should have been when calculating pixels. Our environment artists also did a pass on the structure of the maps to reduce the total number of objects the GPU needs to draw (without negatively impacting visual fidelity or readability). While these optimizations help all machines, they benefit older machines more than newer machines.

We've got a bunch of CPU focused optimizations coming soon that'll help newer machines more. We expect some of those will make the launch patch, and the work is ongoing for future patches. The launch patch will not solve all performance problems -- we'll be keeping our focus on performance.

Howdy,

I want to dive in and address some quick points on how we think about performance and what you can expect from launch. First let me just say that we see launch or 1.0 as the starting line. We're in this for years to come. Perf is part of that commitment.

Performance is a wide range of topics but in terms of top priorities for perf we have 3.

• Accessibility : We want people with low end computers to be able to join their friends in VALORANT. So invite your buddy with his Intel HD 4400 to game with you. They won't be slamming 144FPS down but hopefully they can have fun. For the most part, we seem to be hitting the mark here, there is ongoing work to get all character ability VFX in budget here but it's coming along at a fast rate. We improve a number of abilities every patch. Patch .50 fixed a rather large issue introduced with .49, one of our key GPU optimizations regressed and we had to go fix it up again.

• Combat Perf : This is honestly where we have the most problems the most right now. Combat is also the point in time where performance matters most. In the 1.0 patch, we focus on combat the most. When you get into combat, the simulation gets much more complex. Bullets flying, several abilities going off at once, HUD is displaying new info, just a lot is happening. This puts strain on the "Main Game Thread" which is going to be bottlenecked by the single-threaded performance of your CPU first and foremost. More on this later.

• Average FPS : This is actually pretty healthy in VALORANT right now. Nobody's getting 400FPS but a large percentage of players average over 144FPS. We see plenty of higher end machines hitting 200+ as well. It's something we want to work on in the future but it's pretty in line with our targets on our listed specs.

So if you look at this world you might see why some players disagree about performance in VALORANT.

On the low end you've got a game that can hit reasonable FPS (if you experience problems on the low end try dropping your resolution, make sure improve clarity and anti-aliasing are off).

On the low to mid end. You might have some decent average framerates. You don't need a very powerful GPU to unlock high frames on that end. If you can pair it with a semi-powerful CPU you'll get decent frames. Maybe better than you do in other games. Maybe not, depending on spec.

On the mid to high end. You are probably frustrated by the fact that you have this stellar rig but you still see frame drops below your monitor's refresh rate. However, your average FPS is probably above 144. The higher it is, almost the more frustrating the drops become.

Everyone's right in their own way but they're looking at it from their own perspective.

More on Combat Perf : I told you I'd get back to this. So what does Riot have in store for combat perf? Lets look at a sample of 4 major issues causing dips that we fixed in the 1.0 patch.

• We sped the minimap up by 1ms on the main thread.

• We removed some bullet shell casings that were causing .5-1ms drops per weapon firing on the frame. (we hope to return this feature in a more performant state in future patches)

• We saved .3ms on the pings that appear on the ground when players die.

• We fixed and issue where if you were in a party and did NOT open the options menu at least once in your game (per game), you'd see periodic 20ms drops (not necessarily related to combat but it could happen during combat). Man this was a crazy one to find since these conditions aren't usually met during internal testing. Easy to fix once we found it though.

We're still collating patch notes and fixes for the 1.0 patch. This is just a sampling of the work that's been done. What I want to stress is that we're invested here. We even got some extra engineering muscle from other teams at Riot to be able to get more done on this front. Expect more of that work to land in the 1.1 & 1.2 patches and beyond. We want to get the game to be where it's not dipping below player's 144 monitor refresh rates ASAP. Longer term we want to push that even higher, but some of those projects are going to be more complex and taker longer than a single (or even several) patch cycles. We're right there with you wanting to make this game polished until it shines.

I'm a perf enthusiast and want to help you! I hear you say (not really but here's hoping). The best thing to help is to be clear with your reports around perf. "Barely getting 50FPS" tends to read like your average FPS is 45 or something. It might be more clear to say something like "During big firefights I drop to 50FPS". Videos help A LOT. We've fixed a number of issues from videos players have recorded of specific perf issues. When you report issues please include CPU/GPU as part of the report. It will help us take a quick look at your config and guess if your CPU/GPU bound or on the borderline. That way if we can't reproduce on our work machine we know what kind of computer to try. Do a check up on your own PC's health as well before reporting a perf issue. Check temps, make sure drivers are up to date, things you probably already know as an enthusiast. If you don't know these things we have a lovely technical player support department that can help offer tips towards getting better FPS as well.

On one final note. Quarantine is hard for perf work. I used to be able to just plop myself into the lab on a wide array of hardware and test something. Now we're still waiting on deliveries for specific hardware and have to get it shipped to our homes; that gets delayed too due to Covid. Somethings are out of stock. Yada yada. Not asking for a pity party but just know that getting specific perf data and fixing specific issues can take a lot longer here than we'd normally like. We still have a huge number of developers working to do these things as quickly as possible; we're people behind these words and we want the same thing as you (awesome perf).

Hmm that's a hard one. I've definitely seen weird things when I used to use a bootcamped macbook for gaming.

You might check if your settings got reverted accidentally. With a Radeon Pro 560x you might be gpu bound especially if you're playing at higher resolutions. Try some of the GPU fixes (lowering Res, turn off improved clarity, turn off antialiasing). Does that change your framerate? If it doesn't you're probably CPU bound. Maybe a thermal issue? You can download a tool like HWMonitor to check on that, see temperatures and clock rates.

From the data I've reviewed I don't see specs dropping 50% average framerate even from best patch to worst patch. It's probably best to reach out to player support for something like this. They can maybe go through more of your computer's data and help find anything odd.

Hmmm if it's dropping to 2.4 it's definitely downclocking from the 2.6 base. With those temps it's likely due to thermal load. Try seeing what you can do to run cooler and see if you can get those clocks to the 4.2 turbo the processor supports (likely can't maintain, macbooks/laptops can actually have a pretty hard time with cooling). A cheap quick test can be to very carefully set your laptop on some ice trays to see if you can get temps down. Please be extremely careful if you try this. Other options can be to buy laptop stands with built fans. Other options can be to try finding some fan control software and maxing them out.

Also try not using the external monitor. I've seen some weird HDMI issues that can cause gpu stalls for external monitors. When you switch monitors be sure to put your resolution back down to 1080 and not the 2880 I think your mbp supports.

Anyways I do have to get going now. It's pretty late here. I hope this helps!

This is a bit tricky to answer. I don't want to throw anyone under the bus. Suffice to say we checked in some code with the .47+ that slowed down CPU work across the code base. This code was fixed in .49. However .49 had another (less severe but still pretty major) degradation when we integrated the new version of UE4. So .49 was better but still degraded. We got back more of this perf in .50 and even more in 1.0.

It can all be quite tricky to track and manage as well because it's never one thing. You add new features that players love or ask for in a new patch. You have to get that perf back somewhere else. Sometimes you don't offset it completely. Sometimes you offset it and more. Perf might not get better EVERY patch forever in VALORANT but if you look at the long term trend you should see it going up and to the right. If perf ever got SOOO bad the game was going to be unplayable for a significant chunk of the audience we would block the release. We have pulled features several times that are far outside performance budgets. However, sometimes the tradeoff is worth it. ex: If we can stop 30% of hackers with a 1% performance decrease we're going to do it. We try to offset it in the same patch with another perf increase but if we can't we're still going to do it.

Prior to even beta, VALORANT had invested tons of resources into building tools to track and manage performance of our systems. We look at the data every patch and make adjustments to our performance plans given what we see on live (we do tests internally as well but we have limited hardware and sample size compared to live). However, you have to remember that when y'all get the patch we're already well into developing the next one. So we can't necessarily address every issue immediately in the next patch. We're trying to improve this tooling and our detection capabilities at the same time but we have to balance that work against making perf improvements. My general philosophy on prioritizing the work is that if there are known problems that our tooling detects we fix those first. If our tooling can't detect a problem it's time to improve our tooling. A never ending cycle of improvement.

That definitely seems a bit out of the norm. I get about 300FPS in CSGO and ~200-240FPS in VALORANT.

What do your specs and video settings look like?