Valorant has been around since June 2020 for PC players in most of the world, and since then, the team has been shipping a patch “roughly every two weeks,” with no signs of slowing down. One of the most recent big changes to the game was its shift from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, retaining excellent performance despite the stigma around UE5 optimization in games.

In a developer interview with Marcus Reid, Director of Engineering at Riot Games, we now have some more insight into why and how the team upgraded the engine. Specifically, UE5 sounds nicer to work with for the devs and gives access to a bunch of new tools to help improve the way they develop the game on a day-to-day basis.

Valorant’s Unreal Engine 5 upgrade is more about speeding up dev time

In the interview, he notes that, with help from the upgrades, “we’re really looking for what can we do to speed up our development team to be able to operate more effectively”. If you’re a Valorant player, that means you can expect new things in the game, but without a perceived difference in how it runs or feels compared to UE4. The game should feel the same across all aspects, whether you’re playing on PC, PlayStation 5, or Xbox Series X/S.

“From a developer perspective, we’re a live game, we’re not able to take advantage of some of the banner features like Nanite and Lumen. We really priortize clarity of the read in our gameplay, as well as really high performance across a wide swath of hardware. But there’s still a ton of stuff in the engine that we just get value from day to day.”

Marcus Reid, Director of Engineering at Riot Games

A physics engine change caused some issues

Of course, a full engine upgrade isn’t smooth behind the scenes, but the players shouldn’t notice that. Fixing conflicts when merging content to UE5 and fixing any bugs that presented themselves along the way is a natural part of development, while allowing devs working on future content to now operate on the UE5 branch. However, a change in the physics engine proved to be problematic on the 128 tick rate servers.

“With UE5, we kind of had a notable challenge around the physics engine changing and moving to Chaos. Chaos changed some of our gameplay behaviours, and we really didn’t want any of that to reach players. And so, we built out a a bunch of automation that will go and record the way the gameplay behaviours behave on every tick of our movement timeline”

Marcus Reid, Director of Engineering at Riot Games

This meant going through all of the Agents’ abilities, comparing how they behaved on UE4 and UE5, and amending any problems caused by the switch to the Chaos physics engine. The automated system recorded the game state for every update in the 128-tick movement to achieve this.

Marcus also explains that the team may be able to improve load times with the UE5 upgrade, specifically using Zen Loader and Oodle to speed up the loading. He also mentions using Iris to “optimize the game server further”. We don’t claim to have the technical know-how at an engineer level for UE5, but if you do, be sure to check out the full video below as Marcus delves into it a little more. He also says working in the UE5 editor is “quite a bit more pleasant” than the older UE4 one.

Overall, players can just keep on playing without worrying about performance. In fact, Marcus claims that “most player PCs are going to see a small performance upgrade” with the transition between UE4 and UE5. The upgrade happened on July 29, so if you haven’t played since then, maybe go ahead and check if the game performs any better for you.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.