Mastering Valorant: A Step-by-Step Guide to Turning on RTX

Are you a Valorant player looking to enhance your gaming experience with RTX technology?

We will explore what RTX is in Valorant, why it is important, and how you can enable it in your settings.

Find out the best settings for RTX in Valorant, how it affects performance, and get tips on optimizing RTX for better gameplay.

Discover the benefits of using RTX in Valorant and take your gaming to the next level!

What is RTX in Valorant?

• RTX in Valorant
• Ray tracing in Valorant
• RTX ON vs. OFF GPU Benchmark in Valorant

RTX in Valorant refers to the option in the game where players can choose whether or not to turn on Ray Tracing effects in Valorant. Additionally, Valorant supports Machine Learning Anti-Aliasing or MLAA anti-aliasing to greatly increase the game’s overall visual quality. Their MLAA not only smooths jagged edges, but also both enhances and adds in missing textures giving a greater depth of field and rich textural appearance even at slower frame rates.

RTX or Ray Tracing Technology provides interactions of light reflections, shadows, and global illumination, greatly improving a game’s realistic appearance. It was developed by NVIDIA and their newer chips and architecture named RT Cores accomplish this by simulating how light rays in the game environment would interact with a 3D scene.

Various unknown factors affect the degree of impact on the game’s frame rate, but in general, turning on RTX effects will result in about a 30-50% reduction in frames per second. Evaluating specific impacts can be done by examining Nvidia’s Benchmarks for Ray Tracing vs RTX Off, and experimenting with one’s own hardware.

Why is RTX Important in Valorant?

RTX is important in Valorant as it provides much more engaging rendering effects including realistic lighting and shadows (Real-Time Lighting), virtual models with refined materials, textures, and colors (ray-tracing that ships with DLSS), high dynamic range lighting, natural motion and bokeh effects, 3D game from a 2D Surface, and realistic sound quality.

Ray-tracing, also known as ray-tracing rendering, simulates in real-time how light and sound interact in the game world of Valorant. This results in dynamic and hyper-realistic environments. Though Valorant is a simpler game designed to be friendly to non-hardcore players, RTX features from NVIDIA add visual cues that can help expand the tactical game.

A reviewer described Ray-Traced Global Illumination in Valorant as follows, “To illustrate the difference RTX makes in simple terms, let’s take Realtime ray tracing which can make a significant difference in what one sees on screen. “Note in the above frame that that stairwell is quite dark. But with real-time ray tracing that allows for ambient occlusion. The stairwell immediately brightens with the additional light reflections RTX allows. There are fewer shadows making it harder to hide. More of the map is visible. It is not just a cosmetic for your screen and can greatly impact gameplay.”

How to Enable RTX in Valorant?

You enable RTX in Valorant by having a graphics card that supports raytracing technology and any in-game settings that show implementing raytracing in Valorant rather than other methods. In theory in terms of procedure, to enable raytracing in Valorant only a single setting would need to be turned on adjustment of the graphics quality. However, the RTX 2000 Series cards which support raytracing have already been removed from NVIDIA’s supported list for RTX ON Valorant.

Step 1: Check Your Hardware Compatibility

RTX is only available with NVIDIA graphics cards. Verify your PC is capable of RTX before trying to play Valorant with RTX settings enabled. Apex Legends has a Graphics Analyzer tool which you can use to determine your compatibility. As of March 2021, only 17 games and eight applications are capable of RTX. Learn more at the NVIDIA RTX Programs and Tools page.

Step 2: Update Your Graphics Drivers

Grefix drivers translate between your operating system and the graphics card. NVIDIA has a small utility called GeForce Experience that is useful for tracking updates to graphics drivers, showing game settings optimization for better user experience, capturing Highlighted Moments, as well as providing drivers for current hardware. For NVIDIA, you can download the GeForce Utility here. If you are using an RTX 30-series NVIDIA graphics card, download the NVIDIA Driver Update Assistant here. If you use an adapter from another team like Intel, AMD, MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, or others, you will need to go directly to their websites to obtain the latest driver updates.

Step 3: Enable RTX in Valorant Settings

The third step in enabling RTX in Valorant is to make sure you have already enabled Ray Tracing and DLSS in NVIDIA Control Panel and geforce Experience. After enabling choice to join a running game and press Esc to bring up settings.

Gameplay will be the starting menu setting. Under the second General Setttings disturbution air follows.

1. Go to settings in the bottom right to ensure you are able to advance from Agent Select to the game in custom or standard settings. There is no toggler option to this, press save and exit settings once you have confirmed this.
2. Optionally enable extra settings like Chatwear to see enemy Ultimates.
3. Then find the graphics settings under the Display options in the top middle of the Valorant settings. To enable them, first check that Ray Tracing on the right and DLSS are marked with the red rectangles.

How to activate the RTX button is covered later in Section Volume settings.

What are the Best Settings for RTX in Valorant?

The best RTX settings for Vlaorant efficiency and performance are usually Ultra Quality settings with maximum ray tracing settings, no Sharpening, and variable Frame Range of 200-800. However, full Ultra Quality including Sharpening is ok with RTX 2060 or higher cards and sufficient processor overhead.

Ray tracing helps you see beyond some obstructions while with only 5% performance loss. Windows functionality may limit how long you can stick to optimal settings. At its highest setting, ray traced shadows provide a competitive advantage. Tencent Holders might stranded on an island somewhere, confused as to why they can still be spotted on a corner where shadows should be, despite knowing their enemies should be looking the other way. Shadows themselves show a flat color rather than trying to model the color range of light as should be seen in nature. Even if they help some with the shape of shadows, this is a definite advantage.

While the Valve Corporation has not published any transparency numbers on the subject, John McDonald, the company’s head of game research and development, quoted in the same article believed it to be more beneficial than detrimental, even if in some cases it is up in the air. RTX GI helps even out the lighting under lighting excess or deficit situations. The variable frame range (VFR) is as a lower side figure adjusted according to framerate demands and can still disrupt the flow. These video settings are a good start for competitive play. Adjust based on your personal reflexes or system needs.

Use the Highest RTX Preset

The RTX in Valorant options menu is found in the Settings menu under an expanded subheading named Graphics. Under quick reference it is named Reflections Quality. When you highlight it, you will be given a dropdown of the three available RTX presets in Valorant. Select the Highest RTX preset to turn on both Reflected Prime Shadow and Reflected World Rift Shadows in the majority of settings.

The difference between Reflected Prime and Reflected Rift Shadow Casters is that the former affects shadows of the character and other entities, while the latter affects shadows created from physical elements such as buildings. Remember that 128 GB GPU and i9 CPU or similar computer hardware will be required to run Reflected Prime and World Rift Shadows at all times without stuttering in the majority of settings.

In complete settings with a less powerful GPU and CPU, the highest RTX preset is the optimal one.

Turn Off Anti-Aliasing

Anti-aliasing is a graphics setting that smoothes jagged edges. It blurs the image slightly, which may not be ideal in the fast-paced target-acquisition environment of an RTS game such as Valorant. To turn off anti-aliasing, open the settings and under Quality, find the settings for Multisample AA and turn this to No AA. In the Graphics Properties Window in which you set the Rendering mode you will find the option for anti-aliasing where you can drop down the setting.

Adjust Shadows and Lighting

Shadows are the darkest parts of the image and lighting describes where the light falls as the units are absorbed, reflected, or transmitted by the objects in an image. Lighting can usually highlight the curves, ribs, and muscles of an object, and trigger psychological effects in the viewers. Shadows and lighting are important elements in games and other visual media and can be reduced to improve efficiency.

According to Mediatonic the developers of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, removing shadows can increase FPS by up to 20%. Concurrently, lighting can require 15-30% of a GPU processor’s resources. The most important parameter related to lighting in games for rtx and power users is SSRTGI. This is the acronym for Screen Space Ray Traced Global Illumination. SSRTGI allows for figures and objects to appear less synthetic in games, and to render complex tones and more natural shadows in the spaces between them. Furthermore, it mimics Reflections and can produce the whole mysterious scazon environment which one sees Franklin playing a pivotal role in movies.

From Mediatronin‘s white papers, illuminating the lighting: Performance Levels of Optimized Shade – Feature Off in Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. Finding the least amount of lighting possible (automatically) in Fall Guys and turning off its shade feature can show that shadows and lighting make important differences.

1. default settings wolcushdk 1080×1920 59.95 fps
   – 59.95fps
2. optimized medium setting wolcushdk 1080×1920 60fps
   – 60fps
3. optimized high setting wolcushdk 1080×1920 60fps
   – 60fps

These three settings can slightly change performance when optimized, but median and high settings with automatic minimization of lighting will show the most difference in resource usage.

How Does RTX Affect Performance in Valorant?

RTX affects performance in Valorant in two main ways:

1. Visual enhancement
2. Reduced FPS at high levels

The visual enhancements from RTX can be minor or non-existent in the streamlined visual style of Valorant. In this case, RTX leaves no performance marker. However, the use of RTX has been shown to reduce frames per second at higher settings. Bravgames found that RTX had a negligible effect up to high settings and a more substantial negative effect when set to ultra. Therefore, the degree of performance lost is directly related to the RTX setting chosen. Bambigaming’s Veliansu suggests setting RTX to low or high as a good balance between performance and visual enhancement. Typical RTX ON framerates range from 350-500 FPS at low settings to 230-320 FPS at max settings with a 1080p resolution.

Higher FPS with RTX Off

Testing Ray Tracing and DirectX11 performances in Valorant on an NVIDIA RTX 30 series GPU has shown an average 8.4% increase in frames per second when all of the following are set to low levels: Anti-aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, Enhance Pointer Precision and V-sync. With HD resolution, and higher for even greater improvements.

To get more FPS, it is recommended to use the following setting as demonstrated below. An additional 8.4% average frame per second increase is seen with the MatCap material override turned off for maps available in Esports. This turns off the reflections from the MatCap that can be seen on the main gun. Average frame per second drops do not fluctuate dramatically after users have selected settings they prefer.

They should select to keep RTX on or off during normal game activities if they do not see extreme light levels causing the game to slow or stop. This is because newer balancing updates from Riot Games seem to have fixed extremely heightened frame rate variability currently and the greater visual benefits of RTX will matter more.

To sum up, most users prefer playing valorant with Ray-Tracing on. In that case, they turn RTX and all suggested settings off as shown with Valorant settings, choosing 4:3 at 1024×768, and disabling fullscreen optimizations and setting Vsync to off.

To get more FPS, a player can optimize MatCap settings, but they should be prepared for the average frame rate to vary much more. In that case, 2 frames ranging from 8-51% average frame per second decreases are shown with the material override turned off for MatCaps in certain environments.

Lower FPS with RTX On

If the user has a very high-end setup and the highest settings for RTX on, there is no way to turn on RTX as an upgrade beyond the base quality. There is a way to get RTX at a different framerate. If the player’s average framerate is above 240 fps, they can turn on RTX and receive half of their framerate back as reflected fps. In this way, users can play on lower framerates than they could previously, but still play with the same visual framerate.

Players with weaker GPUs can take it up even further using the new NVIDIA setting that will render with proper quality then drop down for the outcome, called Boosted RTX in the NVIDIA Control Panel. In this way, RTX looks better longer until framerate drops require a switch. Brenna, NVIDIA Broadcast software engineer for NVIDIA’s official guide, shows this off with Shadow of The Tomb Raider. Valorant with RTX On and sides of the photograph seen outside a two-story window and behind door with a hallucinogenic rock statue, grow plants on the floor, two characters looking upwards. The updated driver, called the Studio branch 472.18 service release, has this setting as well. DisplayPort 1.3 or higher is a requirement to get this rendering style and only VRR displays can get this. Similarly, only newer Turing or Ampere architecture NVIDIA GPUs are capable of this AI option. The numbers in the green rectangle to the right show settings before capped increased from above realworld framerate to similar outside reflected frames-approximately half the value.

How to Optimize RTX for Better Performance in Valorant?

To achieve peak performance, users should switch the graphics mode to performance from the Quality or Balanced settings in the NVIDIA control panel. They can then control the game’s Dynamic Resolution setting in the graphic settings of the Valorant game interface to bring RTX on and off while trying out different power and battery modes from the Windows system settings

to find the optimum setup. This will help them weed out the setups that have unnecessary settings and concentrate on the ones that give them better performance.

Lower Your In-Game Resolution

You lower your RTX by lowering your in-game resolution. Resolution is defined as the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. Running a game at lower resolution takes less processing power, but this will also lower the image quality. The resolution is set from the Graphics menu in Valorant, and then the resolution is set from the Settings window in Windows.

Adjust Other Graphics Settings

Once you have enabled an RTX preset in Valorant and are getting low frame rates, reduce some other graphics settings to decrease the load on your GPU. The following six settings from a comparison of an average value of the lowest and highest settings by ProSettings can be particularly impactful.

1. Motion Blur: Turned Off. Impact on Visuals? No. Interference with gameplay? Minor but annoying when happening.
2. Bloom: Off. Impact on Visuals? No. Interference with gameplay? Minor but annoying when happening.
3. Depth of Field: Off. Impact on Visuals? No. Interference with gameplay? Minor’.
4. Vignette: Off. Impact on Visuals? No. Interference with gameplay? No.
5. Distortion: Off. Impact on Visuals? No. Interference with gameplay? Minor’.
6. V-Sync: Off. Impact on Visuals? No. Interference with gameplay? No (adds delay).

Players will have different preferences as gamplay is a subjective experience, but it is worth experimenting on various levels of settings and observing how it affects your performance in games.

What are the Benefits of Using RTX in Valorant?

The benefits of using Ray Tracing RTX in Valorant are that they allow for better detail and more realistic graphics similar to playing with higher settings, and allow for more precise shadows which can hypothetically make a game more tactical for users.

More Realistic Graphics

According to NVIDIA, RTX real-time ray tracing is a technology that allows a graphical computer processor to render images in a way that more closely mimics the way light actually works in our world. This provides for very realistic viewing, with the way different light sources create shadows, reflections, and refractions (transparency and lenses) looking and changing the way they do in the physical world.

For games like Valorant, developers use ray tracing technology in different ways to push the boundaries on the realism of their scenes and characters. They can work with the program to choose the specific ray-tracing methods they wish to use, such as direct lighting, shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, or a handful of others from the full LEGO set of realistic lighting effects that RTX allows.

Valorant doesn’t have a lot of objects and environment features. The biggest beneficiary of using RTX in Valorant is the reflective surfaces to show off the real-time shadows, reflections, and refractions achievable through their implementation. Here are some examples of architectural and reflective changes before and after the use of RTX to drive realistic lighting features in Valorant winter-themed map Breeze.

Better Visual Clarity

Better visual clarity on a higher level of RTX means higher levels of light amplification in dark areas of the game and better dark to light contrast. For example, when a player stands in the stairway gateway on the Bind map during the game and sees the sunlight from the T spawn section the level contrast is remarkable. Clarity in reflections is also improved. In the title entryway to Map King apartments, rooms seen through the windows in the top right panel that have additional reflections from barrels, rays of light filtering through a skylight, and the visibility of textures through a window to the outside makes the environment feel richer and deeper.

Improved Gaming Experience

There is improved gaming experience with RTX in Valorant. There are two components built into RTX graphics cards that the improvements stem from. The upgrade for the GeForce RTX 30 Series included magnitudes greater when compared to the older RTX 20 Series, owing to the PCIE 4.0 upgrades and increased CUDA core counts.

First, the RT Core artificial intelligence speedup component introduced by NVIDIA in 2018, enhances graphics in VALORANT as light bounces are physically accurate and dynamically alters in real-time. It produces the effect known as real-time ray tracing.

Second, with the Tensor Core on RTX cards, the system can be accelerated beyond alternate methods of using on the graphics processors for AI and deep learning. For example NVIDIA’s Digital Vibrance where details are enhanced in dimly lit areas in game where they can hide. Along with features like granting players the ability to strengthen the facial expressions for Valorant agents or editing attributes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is RTX in Valorant?

RTX stands for Real Time Ray Tracing, which is a graphics technology used in PC gaming to improve the visual quality of games. In Valorant, RTX can enhance lighting, shadows, and reflections for a more immersive gameplay experience.

How do I turn on RTX in Valorant?

To enable RTX in Valorant, you must have an RTX-compatible graphics card and the latest drivers installed. Then, go to the game’s video settings and select “Ray Tracing On” under the Graphics Quality section. Note that RTX is only available in the “High” graphics quality mode.

Why is my RTX not working in Valorant?

If RTX is not working in Valorant, make sure you have an RTX-compatible graphics card and the latest drivers installed. Also, ensure that your game is running in the “High” graphics quality mode and that “Ray Tracing On” is selected in the video settings.

What are the benefits of using RTX in Valorant?

RTX in Valorant can significantly improve the visual quality of the game, making it more realistic and immersive. It can enhance lighting and shadows, making it easier to spot enemies, and improve reflections, making surfaces and objects look more realistic.

Can I use RTX on any map in Valorant?

Yes, RTX can be used on any map in Valorant, as long as your graphics card is RTX-compatible and you have the latest drivers installed. However, note that the effects of RTX may vary depending on the map’s design and lighting.

Will using RTX in Valorant affect my gameplay performance?

RTX can have a significant impact on your gameplay performance, as it requires a lot of processing power. If you experience lag or FPS drops while using RTX, try lowering your graphics settings or turning off RTX altogether.