Riot's Valorant and (Seemingly) Random Performance Issues

I love the premise of Riot’s Valorant and believe there is future in the game but their anti-cheat (Vanguard) is negatively impacting my time spent outside of the game. I use this machine for work, gaming and other hobbies.

Ever since installing the game, I’ve had miscellaneous Windows services crippling my system - maxing out my CPU for MINUTES at a time.

  • Upon boot, Windows services would ramp up.
  • Upon plugging in USB devices (such as my phone, wireless headphones, etc), Windows services would ramp up.
  • Upon starting a game with third-party anti-cheat (IE, Rust Easy Anti-Cheat), Windows services would ramp up.
  • Sometimes just playing random games I’d get random hitching (noticeable in Battlefield).

It isn’t like I have a bad machine either - i7-8700k, 32GB of DDR4, RTX 2070, 1TB SSD for games/OS, etc.

So I did some digging.

According to a developer, “…[W]e run a driver at system startup, it doesn’t scan anything (unless the game is running), it’s designed to take up as few system resources as possible and it doesn’t communicate to our servers. You can remove it at anytime.”

While continuing to explore, a friend shared me a thread where someone was playing World of Warcraft and was getting random hitching - while playing, he uninstalled Riot’s anti-cheat Vanguard - it immediately started to pick up.

Going through Reddit, there’s a few other threads and comments experiencing the same thing.

One user wrote a Powershell script that uninstalls Vanguard everytime you close Valorant (LOL). (Can’t find the source on this, must have been removed by mods?)

I’ve since uninstalled Vanguard and literally have none of the problems I was previously experiencing.

I’ve put in a ticket to hopefully find a resolution; but in the meantime, I thought I’d share my experiences so any other users that might have gotten access to the private beta can be aware of what is happening as well.

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I think that the game is in a closed beta, and so is their own brand new anti cheat. I would say its more likely a bug on some systems than something malicious or secretive. I am on a windows 10 insider build and I dont have any issues. What is your system like? Windows 7 or 10? What CPU / Chipset? Do you see a lot of resources being hogged, like is it CPU or disk usage?

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i7-8700k
MSI Z370 Gaming Plus (MS-7B61)
32GB of DDR4
NVIDIA RTX 2070
1TB SSD
1TB WD Black
4TB WD Red

Windows 10 Pro, Ver 10.0.18363 Build 18363

System runs normally otherwise. Only when Vanguard is installed I start to experience issues. Can’t replicate it any other way.

Yikes.

2 Likes

I see this stuff as a FUD campaign. Filling in all the blanks with negatives is just conjecture.
There’s other Ring 0 kernel mode drivers for anti cheat, all Vanguard does it start with the PC kind of like your AV and graphics drivers which people choose to trust.

The difference between hardware drivers and some f2p game is that the hardware is payed for.
When something is free (and not FOSS), you are the product.

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