If you’re worried VALORANT’s Unreal Engine 5 upgrade might tank your FPS, don’t be. Ironically, Riot isn’t using one of the world’s most advanced game engines to chase shinier graphics. Instead, it’s skipping looks entirely to focus purely on performance.
According to Riot Nu, the tech lead at VALORANT, the upcoming 11.02 patch, which is scheduled to bring the UE5 upgrade and due on July 29, will offer “no changes to visuals.” There’s good news for those who play the game on low-end machines, however.
“As part of working on the upgrade the dev team did serious perf(ormance) work across the whole game,” Nu replied to a tweet on X (formerly Twitter). That said, don’t expect anything drastic—especially if you’re already on a high-end PC or console—as the improvement will only be minor.
“You probably won’t notice the difference, but most machines (including low-end systems) will get a tiny FPS improvement on the UE5 patch. Game will play the same,” Nu explained.
Besides the performance upgrade, the UE5 transition will also reduce the amount of disk storage VALORANT occupies. But it’s only after you download the update. To install the patch successfully and get back to the game seamlessly, you’ll need to have at least 30 GB of available disk space due to necessary “content updates” and “decompression cache issues during the update process.”
It’s not like VALORANT lacked optimization before. If anything, it’s widely considered one of the most performance-efficient games out there. And according to Riot, UE5 will only enhance that further.
UE5 might be a powerhouse in 2025, but its reputation for causing performance hiccups makes using it to optimize VALORANT feel almost ironic. And building a game on UE5 without tapping into its graphical strengths feels like a missed opportunity—or even a waste of resources. Then again, according to Riot, it’s not hurting anyone or making the game worse, so what do we know?
