Riot Games addresses VALORANT Unreal Engine 5 concerns

Ahead of the VALORANT Unreal Engine 5 update, Riot Games has addressed one of the community’s biggest concerns about the switch.

A lot of players are worried about the potential drop in game’s performance and FPS after the upgrade; however, the devs have claimed this won’t be an issue.

Marcus Reid, VALORANT’s Tech Lead, assured players that they ‘won’t even notice’ any change and in fact, the game will be slightly ‘faster’ on Unreal Engine 5.

“We believe deeply in building the best possible player experience, and that’s why when we moved to UE5, we made sure that the game looks, feels and plays the same. Same lineups, same gunplay, and same great performance,” he announced on X (Twitter).

The shift will be made on July 29th with the release of patch 11.02 and it will be a significantly larger download compared to previous updates. However, according to Riot, the overall space taken up by VALORANT will be reduced by half. 

The in-game servers are expected to go under maintenance for a few hours before the update rolls out, and its release time will be different for all regions. A dedicated Nvidia graphics driver for VALORANT’s Unreal Engine 5 update was already available a few days ago with the following description:

“On July 29th, a new game update will upgrade VALORANT to Unreal Engine 5, and introduce additional content and changes. By installing our new driver you’ll be Game Ready for the new version of the game, which will continue to include support for Nvidia reflex,” an update stated.

These claims made by Riot are definitely pretty big, and it will be interesting to see if players will have an equally smooth experience.

The Unreal Engine 5 upgrade was announced on the occasion of VALORANT’s fifth anniversary, along with the Replay system, which is scheduled to launch with patch 11.06 in September 2025.