Valorant dev responds to complaints of major FPS drops

The Valorant closed beta has been notoriously struggling with FPS issues, which has led to a Riot Games developer addressing some key concerns with shooting and ability usage.

While the Valorant closed beta has been met with open arms, there have been a number of issues which the developers have had to tackle head on.

Alongside server stabilization problems, Riot have been doing their bit to patch certain glitches and exploits, in a bid to make their beta as close to full release as possible.

Yet regardless of patches, one issue has been persistent since the beta released on April 7 — FPS drops. There have been widespread reports of players running into problems with their frame rate for a number of reasons.

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From claims that the minimap is reducing frames by up to 50 FPS to the pinging system also placing a strain on frame rate, it appears that one of the game’s most necessary consistencies is being hit from all angles.

One player even demonstrated how shooting and ability usage (the game’s fundamental mechanics to dispatching enemies), has a big impact on their FPS. Watch as their client’s FPS on the right-hand side dips by more than 50% when using abilities.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel, as a Valorant dev responsible for performance testing cleared a few things up in the thread.

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Explaining that they use frametime as a more accurate indicator of relative swings in performance, the dev implied that a dip of the magnitude shown in the clip is to be expected.

To top things off, Koalifier calculated that the player is only seeing an increase of around 1 millisecond in frametime when using abilities, which is well within Riot’s expected loss range of 1-3 milliseconds.

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The dev also stated that they’re aware that players’ frame rate is suffering more after Patch 0.49, and are “actively investigating” the issue — alongside Split being the worst map for running into these problems!

So it appears that Valorant’s closed beta might be getting some performance optimization in a forthcoming patch.