Sorry to hear that you're not getting the performance you expected from your rig.

At higher specs Valorant is generally CPU bound on the main game thread. The biggest limiter to FPS on higher specs is going to be core clock speed of your CPU. That is to say, a 2.7GHZ 32 core processor will perform worse than a 4.5Ghz 4 core processor in most cases. GPU is only one factor of your performance and having a powerful GPU alone will not necessarily guarantee you a higher framerate.

Closed Beta is definitely still a WIP and we're looking into optimizations for both CPU side for higher specs and GPU side for lower end specs. It's just a balancing act of trying to optimize for a wide variety of specs. You're always going to be limited by one or the other.

In terms of the RiotClient issue, I believe that was fixed in a patch pushed out last night. If you're still having problems can you try rebooting your computer? Maybe something prevented you from getting that patch. If it still persists can you open a ticket with player support, they can get some logs from you and make sure the right team at Riot gets notified the issue is still persisting for some users.

Exactly right, if you have 8 cores we're probably hitting ~2 full cores worth of usage. So it would end up being 2/8 or ~25% usage. Maybe more or less depending on what's happening in game.

Getting the game to be more multi-threaded can be a steep technical challenge so we're weighing our options there against just making better usage of the cores that we're already using. It's a fine balance, our end goal is just to get framerate higher. We're not necessarily focused on using 100% of all cores if that makes sense. Either way, rest assured we're working on getting more frames for all.

Glad to help!

Oh we're definitely in it for the long haul. I worked on LoL for 6 years and I could easily see myself doing the same for Valorant. Both teams are really strong and dedicated.

I was a McCree main in OW too! I wasn't nearly as good as you though. I was always a few points short of Diamond.

I agree multi-threading could be a huge benefit. We're definitely looking into that as one of our options.

To be clear, if you want to improve your perf, the best bet is not to buy a capture GPU. It's to increase your clock rate of your CPU. You can do this by purchasing something with a higher clock rate or if you're tech savvy (sounds like you are) you might see how much room there is to overclock single core turbo boost on AMD processors.

I gotta put this: Disclaimer: This isn't a Riot official recommendation to overclock your hardware and you do so at your own risk.

It's going to vary a lot CPU to CPU. That being said I think you'll stop seeing gains from additional cores after 4. There are 4 big threaded things in VALORANT.

1 : Main Thread : Gameplay,Character,AbilityLogic,UI,etc. Usually 100% usage

2 : Render Thread: CPU side rendering things like occlusion, draw call submission. Usually 50-100% usage

3 : Audio Thread : Audio processing engine, ~25% usage

4 : Worker threads : Animation, Particles, Misc things. ~3% usage for each. There can be a lot of work threads depending on game events.

So you're really looking at really benefiting from 3 cores or maybe 4. You can reduce the latency on some things but I would expect to see diminishing returns after 4+ cores. After that, you're better cranking up clock speeds. Of course, this assumes you have no other programs running on your computer. Depending on what you're running in the background you might benefit for more cores for that.

Yup, the game can differentiate virtual threads from physical ones on the processor. We set thread priority to inform the OS what's important and try to let it do it's job. Scheduling is an incredibly complex problem all by itself so we let the OS choose the cores given that information. You have to make considerations like how a virtual core can share cache or not. It's widely different across the different CPU architectures. Needless to say we trust that Microsoft's engineers have put far more time, effort and thought into how their scheduler works across a number of CPU architectures. We focus where we have the expertise which is on the game code and threading model itself.

"Is valorant more CPU intensive or gpu intensive?"

I would think about it like this:

If you go out and buy a brand new top-end GPU/CPU today. Your CPU is going to be the limiting factor. We'll probably only use 30-50% of the GPU.

If you have a mid-range computer that you bought 4 years ago. You're probably close to balanced.

If you have a mid-range computer 4+years ago you're probably going to be GPU limited.

We expect that about 50% of players will be CPU bound (higher-end machines) and 50% of players will be GPU bound (lower-end machines). However, this changes as we make specific optimizations for CPU or GPU.

Player support is a better place to get personalized support. They're more familiar with a wide variety of systems and problem-solving. You can create at ticket here: https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Since you mentioned others with the same CPU get better performance off the top of my head I'd suggest:

Checking CPU temps (can be down-throttled if it gets too hot) Checking that your RAM is installed in the proper slots to make use of dual-channel. (this can be killer to performance and is hard to detect)

However, Reddit isn't really a great place to go into detailed individual troubleshooting. Player support can get logs and more system details from you and help you troubleshoot! They're great at it; I encourage you to reach out to them.

Split is still in a beta state (shipped early to increase map pool for players). We have updates in the next patch that should improve perf for that map.

We have seen that Bind is lower performance than Haven. The maps will never be exactly equal in perf but we're keeping an eye on Bind to see if adjustments need to be made.

The patch did have an overall perf decrease of about 10% on average (varies from person to person). We've already identified the root cause and the next patch will return that perf to players.

Tuesday is the plan for the next patch barring anything that would delay it.

The menus are very very easy on the CPU. So you end up GPU limited in the menus (GPU usage goes to 100% if you are uncapped in menus). When you load into game there is more CPU processing that has to be done to deal with processing the actual game. At that point you become CPU limited on a lot of newer systems. Due to the fact that the CPU isn't generating enough frames your GPU load goes down below 100%.

I'm a little surprised bind is the worst performance for you. I think the order we have is:

1 Haven

2 Bind

3 Split (Hasn't had a full optimization pass yet)

The maps will never be 1-to-1 in terms of performance due to being different maps and different hardware always produces different results but it's something we're keeping a close eye on so thank you for the feedback.