Valorant Moves to Unreal Engine 5.3: More FPS and Greater Stability in the Game

In July 2025, Riot Games released patch 11.02 for their competitive first-person shooter, Valorant. The main highlight of this update was the transition from Unreal Engine 4 to the more advanced Unreal Engine 5.3. Despite this significant upgrade, the developers managed to maintain a careful balance between performance and stability without making drastic changes to the game’s visuals — a deliberate and thoughtful choice.

Why Valorant Switched to Unreal Engine 5.3

The main goal behind moving to the new engine was not to drastically improve graphics but to boost stability, smoothness, and efficiency. Unlike projects focused on visual spectacle, Valorant prioritizes the competitive aspect. In a game where every millisecond counts, stable performance and high frame rates are far more important than flashy visual effects.

According to the developers, Unreal Engine 5.3 offers better optimization capabilities, especially on modern systems. This improvement comes from new resource management tools and a reworked rendering pipeline, which maintains visuals close to those of UE4 but handles loads more effectively.

UE4 vs UE5.3: Performance Comparison

A YouTube user named MxBenchmarkPC published a video comparing Valorant’s performance on Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5.3 using an NVIDIA RTX 4070 graphics card. The test showed that the newer version runs with a noticeably higher frame rate, clearly demonstrating UE5.3’s performance advantage.

At the same time, the visual quality remained almost identical. Colors, textures, and lighting were consistent, with only minor improvements. This confirms Riot Games’ conscious decision to avoid excessive visual changes in order not to disrupt players’ familiar experience.

Impact on System Requirements

One notable change was increased load on the CPU, RAM, and video memory with the updated engine. This may cause some issues on older or weaker setups. However, so far there have been no major reports of performance problems from players. It seems Riot succeeded in maintaining a solid level of optimization even for less powerful machines.

Another positive surprise was the significant reduction in disk space usage — the game’s installation files shrank by more than half. This was a welcome improvement for many players and an additional benefit of the new patch.

Tackling Stuttering Issues in Unreal Engine

A common concern when switching to UE5.3 was the appearance of so-called “stutters” — brief frame drops experienced by many UE5 games. However, Valorant did not exhibit these problems. This is remarkable, given that early UE5 versions were often plagued by such issues.

Epic Games engineer Ari Arnbjornsson gave an in-depth presentation at Unreal Fest 2025 explaining the root causes of micro-stuttering in Unreal Engine and shared tips for minimizing them. It’s likely Riot Games leveraged these insights, applying necessary fixes and approaches ahead of time.

Conclusion

The move of Valorant to Unreal Engine 5.3 marks a technical leap forward without sacrificing the game’s core strengths — stability and recognizable visuals. The developers opted for a cautious but smart approach: avoiding unnecessary visual experiments in favor of technical reliability and optimization. This is especially critical for a competitive shooter where players demand precision, responsiveness, and minimal latency in every match.

Patch 11.02 is now available to all players. It not only delivers smoother gameplay and better performance but also significantly reduces the game’s disk space usage. Additionally, the update introduces the new SplashX skin collection, bringing fresh cosmetic content that complements the technical improvements, giving players both enhanced performance and exciting new customization options.