How to fix FPS drops and increase your performance in Valorant for Windows

Do you notice sudden drops in FPS when playing Valorant or does it always stay low? There can be several reasons why this happens: you may have adjusted your graphics quality too high, Valorant may be limiting your FPS, or third-party overlays or other apps may be stressing your hardware.

How to increase FPS in Valorant and keep it stable.

1. Don’t let Valorant limit your frame rate

Valorant comes with settings built in that limit your FPS in various situations. These settings allow you to limit your FPS when the game is idle, when scrolling through menus, when the game is minimized, or when using the laptop’s battery as the primary power source. You can also set it to limit your FPS at any time.

You can allow Valorant to limit your FPS while in a menu and when idle, turned on, since you don’t need high FPS when you’re not actively playing the game. So if they are not already on, you should turn them on. In contrast, you should not limit FPS when running Valorant on battery power, and you should not enable the option to keep it limited at all times.

To configure these settings in Valorant:

1. Press Escape to open the Valorant settings.
2. Navigate to Video tab at the top and open General settings.

3. Beat the options next door Limit FPS on battery and Always limit FPS. Also increase the maximum frame rate.
4. Switch on Limit FPS in menus and Limit FPS in the background opportunities.

2. Change the screen resolution settings in Valorant

The higher the game resolution, the more pixels your graphics card has to render, which can result in a noticeable drop in FPS. If you play Valorant at the highest resolution setting and get a low FPS, reducing the graphics quality will help you reduce the load on your GPU.

To properly optimize graphics settings in Valorant, follow these steps:

1. Press Escape to open the Valorant settings.
2. Navigate to Video tab at the top and select Graphic quality.
3. Turn on Multithreaded Rendering.
4. Keep Material, texture, detailsand UI quality at a low or medium level.
5. Turn off Vignette and VSync opportunities.

6. Set Anti-aliasing to MSAA 4x. Also choose 4x in Anisotropic filtering menu.
7. Deactivate Improve clarity, Experimental grinding, Bloom, Distortionand Cast shadows.

3. Turn off hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling

Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling offloads some CPU workload to your GPU. It improves the performance of high-priority processes on your device. While convenient, this can put extra pressure on your GPU and prevent it from using all of its resources when playing Valorant, causing frame rates to drop.

To disable this feature in Windows settings, check out what hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling means and how to disable it. If you follow the steps and find that the hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling option is already disabled, try turning it on and see if it improves or worsens your FPS.

4. Turn off all active overlays in the game

Do you use in-game overlays with Valorant, such as the Discord overlay? While overlays can help you quickly open apps or chats, they also put more pressure on your hardware. The extra load can reduce the GPU resources allocated to Valorant, causing the FPS to drop significantly.

If you use such an overlay or keep more than one overlay enabled while playing Valorant, turn them off to see how much it affects your game’s performance.

5. Apply some Windows-specific fixes

If none of the fixes covered so far haven’t helped boost your FPS on Valorant, don’t worry. Try applying the following Windows-based tweaks and see if they help things:

1. Turn off animation effects on Windows 11. This should help improve your performance, especially if you’re using a lower-end PC.
2. Turn off the Xbox Game Bar to prevent it from consuming resources. open Settings app, you must select Game tab, click Xbox Game Barand turn it off.

3. Enable Windows’ Game Mode feature. This will automatically disable background processes and apps while playing. You can even use Windows Game Mode to test the performance of any app, not just games. To do so, go to Settings > Game > Game Mode and activate it.

4. Update your graphics driver to the latest version. Also, update your copy of Windows to take care of any minor bugs that may be causing the problem.
5. Boost the performance of Valorant by setting Preference for graphics settings to High. This ensures that you use your preferred graphics card on Windows when running Valorant.

6. Set Valorant’s process priority to high. To do so, open Task Manager, navigate to details tab, you must right-click Appreciate process and choose High from Set priority menu.

6. Optimize your graphics card software

If you previously adjusted your GPU’s software settings (for example, you adjusted your graphics card settings using the NVIDIA Control Panel), re-open the software and turn down some of the settings. This is especially true if you told the GPU software to override any in-game settings you configured.

7. Overclock your GPU for better performance

Similarly, you can overclock your GPU to get the best performance from your hardware. Try overclocking your GPU and see if it improves your FPS. However, note that overclocking the GPU can sometimes negatively affect game performance. If that happens, revert to the change and turn overclocking off again.

Keep your FPS high and stable in Valorant

Low FPS can easily ruin your gaming experience. Hopefully now you will have a better understanding of why FPS drops suddenly or stays low for so long in Valorant. If you carefully optimize the in-game settings and follow the rest of the steps above, you should be able to boost the overall frame rate and make it more stable.