The Best In-Game Settings for Valorant

In the tactical shooter from Riot Games you can adjust many individual settings. We tell you the best options for more victories in Valorant.

It’s never too early to start learning the basic mechanics and gameplay options of Valorant. While the settings can’t ultimately force a victory, they can help you out considerably – especially if you’re just getting started with Valorant and want to lay the foundation for your meteoric rise in the shooter. We have found the best tips and tricks for you in the settings.

General settings for Valorant

First and foremost, Valorant fortunately doesn’t depend on whether you have a high-end gaming PC or can merely play with an old laptop. Valorant can be run on a wide variety of hardware without any problems. Riot Games’ developed accessibility allows Valorant to be played even on PCs with low graphics power, unlike other games that push the GPU to its limits. Just like with the flagship League of Legends, Riot wants to appeal to a large mass of players here.

In the general settings, you can change almost all important details yourself. For example, the map size and network buffering can be adjusted. Most of these affect moment-to-moment gameplay in Valorant, rather than performance or visual clarity. When it comes to Valorant’s accessibility features, there is only one option for the color-blind. “Enemy Highlight Color” is the only form of colorblind option available in Valorant. While this does not drastically change the HUD, this option does highlight enemies.

Red is enabled by default in Riot Games’ tactical shooter, but the game also offers purple and two different shades of yellow to highlight enemy players. We recommend leaving the default red color as you find it in the default settings. Unless you suffer from some form of color blindness, this is the best option for highlighting opponents in color, as the shade of red is easy to see even from a distance.

Ideal mouse settings

As with all FPS titles on the PC, you can change the sensitivity of your mouse under the settings. However, we can’t give any concrete numbers for this that you should set. Rather, the sensitivity is about achieving a perfect balance and aiming accuracy. To test which settings are best for yourself, you can go to Valorant’s practice mode and try out different settings there.

The first sensitivity slider focuses on the speed of general aiming. The second slider is the sensitivity multiplier of the scope. If you want to keep the same movement all the time, you can leave it the same as the normal sensitivity. However, if you want to build some nice sniper mounts, you can set it a little higher. That way, the little movies for the social networks will turn out better and make you look like a real Valorant pro. As a rule of thumb, though, most shooter pros play at a fairly low DPI (400-600) so that every shot can really be placed as precisely as possible.

The next setting for the mouse can be adjusted to your liking. For one, you can set the mouse wheel in Riot Games’ tactical shooter to scroll back and forth through your own inventory, meaning that if you reach the end after two scrolls, you’ll first have to scroll back up. This could prevent you from accidentally “scrolling past” your chosen item in an important fight, and spending the important second during a Valorant fight scrolling to the right place.

The other option that exists is that of infinite scrolling. This way, at the end of the scroll, the inventory jumps back to the beginning, allowing you to quickly switch back and forth between items in the inventory. However, this setting also carries the risk of scrolling too far and missing the right item in the inventory.

Minimap and map settings

The minimap in Valorant, on the other hand, can be customized. This is also very important, because it accompanies you permanently in the game and is essential for winning. First of all, you can choose whether the map should sit at a fixed position or be rotated in the direction of your agent. Some pro players opt for the rotation option, while other pros stick to the fixed setting. You should play with both settings at first with Valorant and see which one you get along with better. If you’re just starting out with Valorant, it’s easier to choose the fixed setting. This way you avoid getting disoriented walking around the environment.

It’s also important to keep the mini-map the same throughout the game. After all, you don’t want to suddenly find yourself on the generic side and not know where to go. To fix this problem, you can set the “Fixed orientation” to “Always the same” in the options. Even though with the “Keep player centered” setting on, you will always be looking at your own agent at Valorant, you will have a greater advantage if you turn this feature off. This way you always have an overall view of the current map. Knowing the position and line of sight of other team members is just as important as knowing your own.

In Valorant, during combat you should always be able to quickly look at the minimap and see where you are. Therefore, we recommend using Riot Games’ settings to the maximum and making the map as large as possible. Ideally, you should set the size to 1.1 and maximize the zoom to 1.

The view cones of the minimap should be on in any case. They are absolutely necessary. This way you can easily recognize your teammates. Really no one should disable this setting unless they want to create unnecessary challenges for themselves.

Display Tracers settings

In the more detailed settings, you’ll also find the option to display the tracers of your weapons. You can either turn this on or off. If you are an experienced Valorant player who knows exactly what recoil each weapon causes and what spray patterns each weapon uses, this can be turned off and you will have a clearer view on the battlefield. In the following image, you can see the comparison between the function turned on (top) and the function turned off (bottom).

All about crosshairs and controls

In the area of crosshairs and controls, everything is up to your preferences. You decide which buttons should have which functions on them and how best to access all the abilities. The easiest way to find out your suitable settings is to try out different functions in the training mode of the Riot Games shooter. This can take quite a while. However, once you have found out your personal settings, it will be a lot easier to quickly and confidently find the keys you need in a Valorant fight.

However, there are some important options to consider here. At Valorant, you can change the default movement mode. This may sound confusing at first, but it can do a lot of good. When you walk, your movements are quieter in Valorant and enemies can’t hear your agent as easily as when you run. Some experienced players prefer to manually slow down their movement speed, while beginners have the “Run” locomotion mode on. Depending on how you handle the sounds, it’s advantageous to adjust your movements individually.

The crosshairs also play a big role in Valorant. Here it is again recommended to find a suitable display. Riot Games gives you the choice between a huge red square and a simple yellow dot in Valorant. Which one is better to play with is actually very easy to figure out. You play a certain number of times with one crosshair and the same number of times with the other crosshair, and at the end you compare your accuracy, your kills, and how you feel when aiming at the respective crosses.

If you feel more comfortable with one crosshair than the other, it is recommended to use the latter in the future. Thanks to Valorant, you can adjust the crosshairs with a lot of attention to detail – an option that the competitor Counter-Strike was denied for quite a long time.

You should know these graphics and audio settings

Valorant’s graphics settings allow you to get the most out of your game. Especially the FPS (Frames per Second) are essential in a game where every second could be the difference between life and death. Fortunately, you can also play Valorant on a PC or laptop, which is not a high-end device.

If you’re using more than one monitor for Riot Games’ tactical shooter, you should first make sure that the highest possible refresh rate is running on the screen you want to play Valorant on. Window Full Screen is the best option if you have a setup with multiple monitors. This allows you to quickly switch to another screen using the Alt-Tab combination, for example to watch recorded videos on repeat or to follow a guide.

The FPS number is highly dependent on the performance of one’s PC. You can use Valorant’s option to get as many FPS in as possible. However, we recommend limiting the FPS to a certain number. To get the most out of the game, the first four options can be set to Low right away. The difference here is so minimal that you will hardly notice it. The game will remain relatively similar in terms of appearance, but you will clearly notice an improvement in performance.

Capping the FPS also makes sense because you’ll then be playing with exactly the same preconditions in every game. Success in first-person shooters is quite often a matter of habit, and the more uniform your technical setup, the higher your chances of getting better at Riot Games’ tactical shooter. Vignette and VSync are turned off by default, and we think they should stay off. If VSync is disabled, there is a chance that you can get a higher frame rate than if you have the feature enabled, despite the refresh rate of your monitor.

Anti-aliasing

Anti-aliasing in Valorant helps make textures look a bit smoother and can improve graphical impressions, but this setting also costs quite a bit in performance. With MSAA 4x you get the best performance in Valorant, but your PC or laptop has to be able to handle it. Anisotropic filtering also plays a role in Valorant. This setting should be set as high as possible. Essentially, this option plays a role in how detailed the game is from a distance. At 1x, textures at a distance are of very low quality. At 16x, you can see all the details in the distance accurately, but you also need a very good and powerful PC for this.

Rendering distance is crucial in Valorant, so you can see your enemies from far away and predict exactly what they are up to. Increasing the clarity doesn’t play too much of a role in Valorant. It has a minimal effect on smoothing objects in the distance. The other functions behave similarly to clarity and make such a small difference that it almost doesn’t matter if they are turned on or off. Care should be taken here that when the settings are on, the performance of the PC is not affected too much.

Also client FPS can play a crucial role one Valorant players. If you want to keep an eye on the performance of your computer, it is recommended to turn it on. This way you can read the different performances during the game and understand if you are getting less FPS or if you have a higher ping. If you want to monitor your own network, you can enable the server tick rate, the network roundtrip time and the packet loss.

On the subject of audio, there isn’t too much to adjust in Valorant. As long as the voice chat is set up, you can start into a Valorant game. But not only settings can help you to win.