What is global invalidation in VALORANT?

Improve performance with Riot's newest addition to its hit shooter.
Image via Riot Games

If you’re a VALORANT player who has been struggling to improve their game’s performance, then Patch 4.03 has some good news for you. Riot Games has added a new feature called global invalidation that should help speed things along for you and your PC.

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During a game of VALORANT, there are multiple aspects that continuously change on screen while the match plays out. Global invalidation should reduce the number of UI elements that need to refresh. Users should, as a result, get a boost to baseline performance up to 15 percent. This number was acquired over two weekends of testing and is apparently the “single largest performance gain for clients since launch.”

https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb6530b271fddd0b1/bltf624d5a4b5d19b5b/622297a13906ee6894809961/global-invalidation-summary-flow.jpg?disposition=inline
Image via Riot Games

“Realizing these gains was an effort that spanned multiple teams and took many months to complete,” VALORANT software engineer Aaron Cheney said in a developer’s blog post. “Our process for identifying areas of the game ripe for optimization paid off, and managing risk along the way helped ensure a stable experience for players.”

The new feature was actually put in motion in July 2021 when the developers started investigating possible solutions to help improve performance. A few months later, they started to place their changes into the game and test them for bugs that would require squashing. Through the final month of 2021 heading into 2022, Riot tested out global invalidation on the VALORANT PBE before its official launch.

Any CPU-bound players can try out global invalidation on the live servers now.


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Author
Tyler Esguerra
Lead League of Legends writer for Dot Esports. Forever an LCS supporter, AD carry main, with more than five years in the industry. Sometimes I like clicking heads in Call of Duty or VALORANT. Creator of the Critical Strike Podcast.