[2021] VALORANT Patch Notes 2.11

Hi there! Riot Torqued from Valorant's performance team here.

I wanted to share some insights into how we're approaching improving Valorant's performance. When talking about performance we don't just look at systems average fps, but also what is the minimum FPS that players see(how much fps is dropping by).

There's two broad ways we can improve this. We can either raise average FPS, so the minimum FPS you see is higher. For example, dropping from 180-> 140 would feel better than dropping from 140-100. The other thing we can do is optimize things that cause FPS to drop, so that the drops are lower.

Ultimately to achieve our performance goals we'll be focusing on making both kinds of improvements with success for us being measured by the minimum FPS that players see, not just the average.

Improving CPU utilization on processors by improving multithreading/parallelization is a long term goal of ours.

You can find more details on CPU and GPU bottlenecks in this thread from RiotNu https://twitter.com/RiotNu/status/1368020331844169731?s=20

We'd like to be transparent with the steps we're taking to improve performance. With our two week release cadence, we'll likely have a lot of improvements be smaller optimizations that add up over multiple patches, rather than one big change that goes out at once.

The alternative for us is to either not call out the changes we're making or just generally say "performance optimization were made" which I don't think is a good way to share the work we're doing.

We've seen reports(and reproed internally) where disabling HPET has improved performance for certain configurations.

While we could be wrong, our understanding is that Invariant TSC should be what's being used and not HPET, and that the default is to use ITSC over HPET(which is what disabling HPET would be returning things to). You would still have accurate, high precision timing with ITSC when calling QueryPerformanceCounter.