Valorant is a multiplayer shoot ‘em up for which smooth gameplay is always important. However, many Valorant players have spoken about significant stuttering ruining their experience for that game. This is what one player said on Reddit, “Valorant stuttering terribly in 2023… I have an RX 6950 XT, and my game stutters awfully on a consistent basis.” Riot has even rolled out updates to resolve Valorant’s ‘combat hitches,’ but players still widely report significant stuttering for that game. Here are some ways you can fix Valorant stuttering on a Windows PC.
Adjust In-Game Valorant Settings
First, try adjusting some in-game Valorant settings. This means reducing or disabling some graphical and general settings to boost gaming performance. Your game won’t look as good, but may play better with less Valorant stuttering, as a result. Click Settings on the Valorant menu screen to select Video > General and adjust the game’s settings like this:
- Multithreaded Rendering: On
- Material Quality: Low
- Texture Quality: Med
- Detail Quality: Med
- UI Quality: Med
- Vignette and VSync: Off
- Anti-Aliasing: MSAA 4x
- Anisotropic filtering: 4x
- Improve Clarity, Experimental Sharpening, Bloom, Distortion, and Cast Shadows: Off
Valorant’s video settings
In addition, consider setting a lower resolution graphical setting to fix Valorant stuttering. This will reduce the pixels displayed, making each frame lighter to produce in that respect. However, a lower resolution will noticeably impact Valorant’s graphical quality.
Disable Background Apps by Applying a Clean Boot
Clean booting will set your PC to start with minimal third-party programs and services. This is a good way to limit unnecessary background apps to free up system resources for playing Valorant. Maximizing system resources for the game in this way can potentially reduce Valorant stuttering if many third-party background apps are starting on your PC. Microsoft’s clean-boot guide tells you all the steps required for applying this resolution with MSConfig and Task Manager.
The Services tab in MSConfig
Disable Discord’s Overlay and Hardware Acceleration
Players have said disabling Discord’s overlay and hardware acceleration features has remedied Valorant stuttering on their PCs. Do you have Discord installed on your PC? If so, try disabling Discord’s overlay and hardware acceleration as follows.
- Open the Discord window.
- Click the User Settings button.
- Select Advanced.
- Turn off the Hardware Acceleration setting.
The Hardware Acceleration setting
- Click Game Overlay in the sidebar.
- Toggle off the Enable in-game overlay option.
The Enable in-game overlay setting
Disable Fullscreen Optimization for Valorant
Players often report disabling fullscreen optimization for Valorant and other PC games fixes stuttering. Fullscreen optimization is a feature that runs games with an optimized borderless window mode, limiting the display control a game has. This feature is always enabled by default, and you can disable it for Valorant as follows:
- Activate File Explorer by clicking its pinned library folder taskbar shortcut.
- Open the Riot Games > Valorant > live > Shooter Game > Binaries > Win64 folder on your PC.
- Right-click the Valorant-Win64-Shipping file in the Win64 folder to select Properties.
- Click Compatibility to select the box for the Disable fullscreen optimizations setting.
The Disable fullscreen optimization checkbox
- Press the window’s Apply > OK buttons to save the selected Disable fullscreen optimizations setting.
Reduce Your Mouse’s Polling Rate
If significant Valorant stuttering occurs when moving your mouse, try lowering your mouse’s polling rate from 1,000 to 500. You can find and change the polling rate setting within the configuration software for your mouse. For example, users with Razer mice can change the Polling rate option on the Performance tab in the Synapse software.
The Polling Rate setting for a Razer mouse
Update the Graphics Driver on Your PC
NVIDIA and AMD regularly roll out new drivers for graphics cards every few months. It is necessary to update drivers for graphics cards to optimize gaming performance. Valorant stuttering will more likely arise if you’ve neglected to update your graphics card’s driver for many months or years. This is how you can update the graphics driver on your PC.
- Check the graphics card model you have by opening Run (press Windows logo key + R), entering dxdiag, and clicking OK. You can then view graphics card info on the Display tab of the DirectX Diagnostic Tool.
The Display tab
- Open the NVIDIA or AMD webpage for downloading graphics drivers.
- Select your PC’s Windows platform and GPU model and click Submit/Search.
The NVIDIA driver download page
- Click Download to obtain the compatible driver package for your graphics card.
A Download option for a driver
- Go to the folder your browser downloads and double-click the NVIDIA/AMD driver file.
- Select the installation option within the graphics driver setup window that opens.
Other Possible Ways to Fix Valorant Stuttering on a Windows PC
There are also numerous other possible ways you can feasibly fix Valorant stuttering on a Windows PC. If the game still stutters a lot after applying the possible remedies above, try these extra troubleshooting methods:
- Select the High Performance graphics card setting for Valorant in Windows 11/10.
- Disable the Hardware accelerated GPU scheduling setting in Windows.
- Select the Ultimate performance or High performance power plan setting in the Control Panel.
- Also, select Prefer maximum performance for the global Power management mode setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel.
- Disable Game Bar’s Record game clip and Record in the background settings if enabled.
Applying one or a combination of the potential resolutions above could fix or at least reduce the Valorant stuttering on your Windows PC. This will make the game more playable with less stuttering in crucial action-packed moments.
