If you’ve been lucky enough to get into Riot’s impressive new competitive shooter, you’re likely ceasing to function as a human as the game takes all of your available time, every day. It’s so easy to re-queue that I find entire days have gone missing since I’ve begun to play, and there’s a fantastic wealth of competition to be found at all hours of the day (and night). Everything has taken a back seat to the team-based shooter, including a (once again) growing backlog of games.
Yet people who want to explore other games in the meantime have run into an interesting issue, and it all seems to stem from Valorant.
Valorant comes packaged with a unique anti-cheat called Vanguard that runs at the kernel level on a PC; it’s on whenever your PC is on, regardless if you’re looking at playing Valorant. This alone has been a cause for concern, as an externally-controlled program having root control over your PC isn’t necessarily something that many people would celebrate. Imagine willingly putting a backdoor into your PC; that’s Vanguard.
Riot developers have taken to Reddit stating that they’ve done everything within their power to ensure that the system usage, prior to beginning Valorant, is at an absolute minimum and as safe as they can make it.
On the other hand, many fans are clearly frustrated by this intrusive anti-cheat.
It’s worth noting that every anti-cheat known to man has critics, and that criticism is a primary means of bad actors to force developers to weaken their anti-cheat, inevitably allowing said bad actors to circumvent checks in place to cheat without being punished. Valve has experienced this in wealth with Counter-Strike, and Riot is likely only beginning to experience their fair share of bad actors attempting to rabble-rouse on social forums.
Yet this time there is something that is clearly wrong with Riot’s Vanguard, the anti-cheat for Valorant. Users that have entered the beta, thus installing the anti-cheat on a root level, are experiencing frame drops in almost every single other game. Reports range from World of Warcraft to Borderlands 2, and almost everything in between. The only possible cause that users have been able to discern thus far is that everyone suddenly reporting frame drops has entered into the Valorant beta.
If you’re experiencing frame drops, there’s only one solution that the community has figured out thus far: uninstall the anti-cheat. Uninstalling Valorant will only remove the application, yet leaves the anti-cheat continuing to operate on your system. You’ll need to navigate to your Control Panel, and find the application called ‘Riot Vanguard.’ Remove that application, restart your PC, and you’ll be able to enjoy your other titles without dropping frames like a sleep schedule.
