Riot Games is rolling out a version of Valorant's Vanguard anti-cheat that no longer has to run around the clock on every player's machine. Announced on the studio's official website on June 24, 2026, the update lets Vanguard's driver sit dormant until someone actually opens a Riot game — a direct response to years of pushback over the anti-cheat's always-on footprint.
An End to the Always-On Complaint
Since Vanguard launched, one of the most persistent criticisms from the Valorant community has been that its kernel-level driver loads at system startup and keeps running even when Valorant isn't open, a design choice Riot has defended as necessary for catching cheat software before a match begins. The new on-demand mode changes that behavior for eligible players: the driver stays inactive until a Riot title is launched, only spinning up when it's needed to monitor an active session.
A Hardware Checklist Limits Who Gets It
The feature isn't available across the board just yet. Riot has attached a set of system requirements, referred to as "Vanguard Pre-Check," that a PC must meet before the on-demand mode can be used. That list includes Windows 11 version 25H2, Secure Boot enabled, a TPM 2.0 chip, IOMMU support, and Virtualization-Based Security switched on. By Riot's own estimate, roughly 35% of the Valorant player base currently satisfies all of those conditions, with that share expected to rise by about one to two percentage points every month as more machines get updated and configured correctly.
The Technology Making It Possible
The on-demand switch is built on a new Windows capability Riot developed alongside Microsoft's Xbox OS security team, known as Runtime Driver Attestation. It lets Vanguard confirm that no cheat-enabling drivers were loaded on a system before a game starts, even without the anti-cheat having been active the whole time to watch for them. That capability directly answers the reason Riot originally gave for keeping Vanguard running nonstop: without constant monitoring, someone could load a malicious driver and then remove it again before Vanguard had booted up and had a chance to flag it. Runtime Driver Attestation sidesteps that vulnerability by verifying driver integrity at the system level, so the anti-cheat can confirm a machine is clean without needing to physically run in the background at all times. Because of the strict hardware bar Riot has set, most Valorant players won't see the change immediately, but the move marks a notable shift in how the studio is trying to balance effective cheat detection against long-running complaints that Vanguard's constant presence was more invasive than necessary.
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