Best Valorant settings for max FPS (2026)

Updated November 2026 · 6 min read

Valorant is one of the lightest shooters around. Riot built it to run on old office PCs, and that's good news if your rig is modest. It also means most of your FPS problems come from a few switches in the video menu and from Windows itself, not from your hardware being too slow.

All of the settings below live under Settings › Video, split across the General, Graphics Quality and Stats tabs. Riot moves things occasionally, so if a name has changed, look for the closest match.

The one switch that matters most

Turn on Multithreaded Rendering under Graphics Quality. Valorant leans on your CPU far more than your graphics card, and this setting lets it spread that work across more cores. On most PCs with four or more cores it's a big gain, and we've never seen a good reason to leave it off on a modern machine. If you get crashes or odd stutter after turning it on, switch it back off and test again.

Recommended settings

Why these choices

Low quality doesn't hurt you in Valorant. The game was designed so that the Low preset still shows every agent clearly against the map. Material and detail quality mostly change the look of walls and props. You lose some polish and gain frames, and in a tactical shooter that trade is easy.

Textures are the exception. If your graphics card has spare memory, Medium or High textures barely change your frame rate and make the game less muddy. On integrated graphics or a 2 GB card, keep them Low.

Bloom, distortion and vignette are cosmetic. They add glow and screen effects that look nice in a highlight clip and make it slightly harder to read a fight. Off.

VSync adds input lag. Leave it off. If screen tearing bothers you and you have a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor, use that instead and cap your FPS a few frames below the refresh rate.

Reflex is free. It doesn't raise the FPS counter much, but it cuts the delay between your click and the shot on screen. On + Boost is the right choice for almost everyone with an NVIDIA card.

Should you cap your FPS?

On a desktop, no. More frames means newer information on screen, even past your monitor's refresh rate. On a laptop it's a different story. An uncapped Valorant can push a thin laptop into thermal throttling, and then your FPS swings all over the place. A cap at your refresh rate keeps it cooler and steadier.

What about resolution?

Some players drop to a lower resolution or a stretched 4:3 setup for more frames. It works, because Valorant renders fewer pixels, but on a CPU-limited PC the gain is often smaller than people expect. Try native resolution with the settings above first. If you're still short of your monitor's refresh rate, test one step lower and compare the numbers, not the feeling.

Fixes outside the game

Because Valorant is CPU-heavy, background apps and Windows power settings hurt it more than most games:

• Close browsers, launchers and overlays you don't need before you queue.
• Turn on Game Mode and set the power mode to Best performance.
• Turn on your RAM's XMP or EXPO profile in the BIOS if it's off. Memory speed matters in CPU-bound games.
• Check that your monitor runs at its full refresh rate.

Every step, with exact menu paths, is in our Windows 11 FPS guide.