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.
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.