Valorant’s high-quality settings can surprisingly buff certain Agents

Changing your graphic settings in Valorant can actually change what’s possible with certain Agents, as new textures have been discovered on the highest options.

Lowering your graphical settings in any FPS game is common practice to get the best performance and Valorant is no different. You want the highest frame rate possible to have the smoothest performance and never feel cheated by your system.

You may have instinctually lowered everything the moment you first booted up the game. New discoveries might force you to change that, however. If your PC is capable of running Valorant with higher settings enabled, that is.

Maps can surprisingly change in small ways with higher settings switched on. Textures will appear that simply don’t exist on the lowest options. While many of them are strictly visual, some actually exist as new geometry. Allowing Agents to interact with them and therefore providing new options.

While experimenting in a custom game on July 12, Reddit user ‘Interr0gate’ found a few of these discrepancies. One of the major textures appears in the middle of Ascent just next to the market.

On the lower settings, bullets appear to make an impact and Sova’s Recon Bolt sticks into an invisible surface. Nothing can be seen in the sky, but all signs point towards some kind of geometry sticking out.

Switching to the higher graphical options, an entirely new clothesline appears overhead. Half of the clothes hanging down can be shot through as though they didn’t exist. But the other half are fully rendered into the map, allowing all sorts of abilities and weapons to interact.

This may not seem like the biggest deal at first, but it can establish a huge imbalance. For those on the lower settings, the thought would never even cross their mind to check this location. But for those on the higher settings, that could serve as a cheeky new Recon Bolt spot.

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Split is another map that features a visual difference as well. A new texture appears at A ramp on the highest setting. While this isn’t quite as significant, it can allow for all-new ability line ups across the board. 

A wide array of Agents can benefit from these additional textures. Cypher can place new Spycams, Viper can angle new Toxic Screens, and plenty more. It’s a clear discrepancy that could leave those with less powerful gaming rigs at a slight disadvantage.

Riot are yet to comment on the issue, though it’s likely these specific examples are fixed in the near future. Keep your eyes peeled for other surprising textures that may now be discovered on the highest settings, however.