Riot Games has confirmed that Valorant, one of its most popular games, will be updated to make the jump to Unreal Engine 5, a next-generation graphics engine known for very demanding although it is also quite scalable if its most important graphics enhancements like Lumen are disabled.

Valorant was developed by Unreal Engine 4, but in a very special way, because Riot fully focused on optimization, which made this game one of the most accessible and best optimized of all those that use the mentioned graphics engine. This is evident in its requirements, which are very low, and how well it performs even with low-power integrated graphics cards.

If we look at the requirements, we realize that starting with an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon 200GE processor and Intel HD 4000 It is playable at 30 FPS and with such a basic configuration as Intel Core i3-4150 or Ryzen 3 1200, 4 GB RAM and GeForce GT 730 or Radeon 7 240 we can play Valorant in 1080p with 60 FPS.

These very affordable requirements helped skyrocket the popularity of this game. Riot is aware of this and knows they can’t allow Valorant’s jump to Unreal Engine 5 to trigger the game’s requirements. If that happens they could lose a large player base. To reassure players, Anna Donnlon, who is the SVP and head of Valorant’s development teams, said that they have nothing to worry about in this regard.

According to Anna, this update to Unreal Engine 5 will not significantly affect neither the graphical quality nor the performance of Valorant, at least not for now. Good news, especially for those who have very modest computers and who could not cope with the significant increase in the requirements of this game.

What can we expect from Valorant under Unreal Engine 5

From Anna’s words, I think it’s pretty clear what the short to medium term future looks like for this game. We’ll see small graphic improvement which will result in slight increase in requirements, at least in this first phase. Other graphical improvements may be introduced later that will affect the game to a greater extent, but this is something that is not confirmed.

Even after updating to Unreal Engine 5 Valorant it will still be a very affordable game which will work on almost any PC and almost any integrated GPU. League of Legends, another of Riot Games’ most popular games, is cut from the same cloth, an extremely popular title and very affordable in terms of requirements.

Both are two best free games with few requirements which we can find on PC right now.

Anna Donlon announces #VALORANT will switch to Unreal Engine 5 👀! pic.twitter.com/WQlddIcJ9r

— VALORANT Leaks & News (@VALORANTLeaksEN) October 2, 2024