Riot Games’ latest competitive shooter has taken the videogame industry by storm. The player count of VALORANT is increasing with every passing day as more and more players are getting their chances to opt into the closed beta.
When initially announced, Riot had promised fans that VALORANT would run even on decade old PCs. However, players have already started raising their concerns about the performance optimization for the game even within only a few weeks since its closed beta release.
A recent Reddit post has brought to light the FPS drops caused while shooting, bullet holes and the abilities of Sage.
FPS drops in a competitive game like VALORANT is certainly a cause of concern, because an unwanted and unexpected frame drop mid-game can decide the fate of a round. Fast paced games like this should be free from performance issues to provide a smooth and fair gaming experience for its players.
Fortunately, a Riot dev and a member of VALORANT’S performance team – Kevin “Koalifier” O’Brien came across the Reddit post and responded to the issue.
He started his reply by assuring the players that the VALORANT team is aware of the performance issues which have seemed to gotten worse in the current patch and that they’re “actively investigating” this problem.
He then clarified in his comment that the FPS drops from shooting might not be a major cause of concern after all. He stated, “The client FPS graph is not showing you a per-frame number, but shows you a rolling average that is calculated every frame. This is mainly to make the graph more easily readable during gameplay. This means that the reason your FPS dips while the abilities are on the screen, and then recovers after they leave, is really just a coincidence of timing. Firing your weapon & using abilities is causing a momentary dip, but it’s smoothed out in the graph so you see this slow recovery.”
He then admitted that the bullet holes causing performance drops were in fact true, “but not in the way that you might think! We have a performance optimization in the next patch that should reduce the cost of shooting through surfaces substantially (.4->2.4ms reduction or so).”
Kevin later edited his comment after checking the other comments which said that the map Split is causing the most performance issues. He responded by saying that they’re “aware and actively investigating it!”
