5 Valorant BIOS Settings That Actually Cut Input Lag (Plus the Popular Tweak Vanguard Will Block)

Most “best BIOS settings for gaming” lists are copy-pasted across every game on the internet — the same ten toggles, the same vague “improves performance” caption, and zero mention of what happens when Riot’s own anti-cheat disagrees with the advice. Valorant isn’t a generic GPU-bound AAA shooter: Riot’s own developers have said the game is deliberately CPU-bound, and Vanguard now requires specific security features that a lot of “optimize your PC for gaming” guides tell you to switch off [1][2]. Test each change below against NVIDIA’s own click-to-photon model of system latency — mouse, then CPU, then memory, then GPU/PCIe, then display [3] — and it’s obvious why some popular tips do nothing here while one specific one can stop the game from launching at all. (For the in-game side — crosshair, resolution, video settings — pair this with our Best Valorant Settings guide. Everything below happens one level lower, in the BIOS/UEFI, before Windows even loads.)

The Latency Pipeline Most Guides Ignore

NVIDIA’s own Reflex documentation splits “input lag” into distinct stages: your mouse’s own hardware latency, the time Windows and the game take to process that click, the CPU’s render-command preparation, the GPU’s frame rendering and PCIe data transfer, and the final scan-out to your display [3]. A generic BIOS tips list treats all of that as one blob and recommends the same ten toggles for every game, which is backwards for Valorant specifically. Riot has confirmed the game is deliberately CPU-bound: “we as a game prioritize accessibility over visual fidelity. There’s just not as much work to do to render the game, as there is to compute simulation updates,” a Riot developer explained when asked why GPU usage sits at 40–50% while the CPU pins at 99% [1]. That single fact changes which BIOS settings are actually worth your time. The five below are organized by which stage of that pipeline they touch — not by how often they show up on other sites’ lists.

Quick Start: The 5 Changes at a Glance

All five live in your motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI — not in Windows or Valorant’s own menu — reboot and tap Del or F2 during POST to get in. The two changes with the biggest real effect on this specific game are the memory profile and the CPU idle setting; the rest are smaller, free wins.

Change 1: Fix Your Memory Profile (XMP/EXPO)

Every DDR4/DDR5 kit boots at slow JEDEC default speeds and loose timings until you tell the board otherwise — the rated speed printed on the box only applies once you enable Intel’s XMP or AMD’s EXPO profile. This isn’t a marginal tweak for Valorant: going from a 2133MHz JEDEC baseline to a 3600MHz XMP profile has been measured at a 10–15% average FPS gain in CPU-bound scenarios [4], and Valorant is about as CPU-bound as competitive shooters get [1]. The mechanism is straightforward — Valorant’s dominant game-logic thread has to keep pulling player state, hit detection, and ability data out of RAM every single frame, and a faster, tighter memory profile shortens that round trip.

In BIOS, this lives under the overclocking/tweaker tab — the name varies by vendor (Ai Tweaker on ASUS, OC Tweaker on ASRock, M.I.T. on Gigabyte) — as a single “XMP” or “EXPO” dropdown. Pick Profile 1, save, reboot, and confirm the new speed in Windows Task Manager’s Performance tab or HWiNFO. If your kit is unstable at its rated speed (Windows itself crashes, not just Valorant), drop to Profile 2 if your kit offers one, or manually loosen timings by one step rather than abandoning the profile entirely — running at stock JEDEC speeds is strictly worse for this specific game.

Change 2: Resizable BAR + Above 4G Decoding

Resizable BAR lets the CPU address your GPU’s entire VRAM in one block instead of the older 256MB-at-a-time windowing, cutting overhead on every PCIe data transfer; Above 4G Decoding is the prerequisite setting that has to be enabled first [5]. NVIDIA’s own launch numbers set realistic expectations: gains “vary substantially from game to game… some titles benefit from a few percent, up to 12%. However, there are also titles that see a decrease in performance” — which is exactly why NVIDIA gates it per-game with driver profiles instead of enabling it everywhere [5].

Generic BIOS lists skip this: Valorant isn’t one of the GPU-bound AAA titles — Cyberpunk 2077, Forza, Assassin’s Creed — where reviewers measured the big double-digit wins. Since Riot’s own engine is deliberately light on the GPU and heavy on single-thread CPU work [1], don’t expect a dramatic FPS jump here. The real benefit is a smaller, harder-to-benchmark cut in the per-frame CPU-side overhead of talking to the GPU — which matters more in a CPU-bound game than the raw VRAM-access win AAA benchmarks report.

It’s still worth turning on: it’s free, has no downside on a stable Intel 10th-gen-or-newer or AMD Ryzen 3000-or-newer platform paired with an RTX 30-series or RX 6000-series GPU or newer, and you’ll want it enabled anyway for anything GPU-heavier you play later. Enable Above 4G Decoding first (same PCI Subsystem Settings menu), save and reboot once, then go back in — the Resizable BAR / Smart Access Memory option is greyed out until Above 4G is already on. If the option is missing entirely, check your exact CPU and GPU generation against our Valorant PC requirements breakdown before assuming your BIOS is broken.

Change 3: Cap C-States at C1, Don’t Just Disable Them

C-States are the CPU’s idle power-saving levels — the deeper the state, the more power it saves, but the longer it takes to wake back up to full speed (C0) [6]. In a fast-paced shooter the CPU is constantly flickering between light load and full load, and MakeUseOf traced its own unexplained frame-time dips directly to this: “returning to C0 isn’t instantaneous… the penalty increases depending on whether the CPU is returning from a higher C-state. This delay then causes frame-rate dips and stutters” [6].

Here’s where most gaming BIOS lists oversimplify: “disable C-states” isn’t a universal fix. Real reports on hardware-enthusiast forums are mixed — one player on a Z790 board found that fully disabling C-states made kernel-timer latency worse, and got a smoother result by re-enabling C-states but capping the floor at C1 (the shallowest, fastest-waking state) instead [7]. Pro-audio engineers use that same C1-only approach to avoid crackling at sub-5ms buffer sizes, but even there, “I don’t think anyone out there has actually done proper measurements on this to get exact data” [7].

The honest version: set your BIOS’s C-State limit to C1 (not “disabled” outright) as your first attempt, and only go further if you’ve actually benchmarked your own 1% lows before and after. This is the one change on this list worth testing both ways rather than trusting blindly.

Change 4: Turn Off PCIe ASPM

ASPM (Active State Power Management) is a firmware feature that lets your motherboard drop the PCIe link to your GPU or NVMe drive into a low-power sleep state whenever it looks idle [8]. The problem shows up on the way back out of that sleep state. As XDA Developers put it: “the PCIe link needs to transition from the sleep state to full power,” and that transition is exactly the kind of momentary stall that reads as a stutter or a hitch rather than a lower average frame rate [8] — a transition-latency problem, not a throughput problem, which is why it maps so cleanly onto “input lag” specifically instead of benchmark FPS.

ASPM exists mainly to protect laptop battery life; on a desktop gaming rig there’s no battery to save, so disabling it has essentially no downside [8]. Look for “PCIe ASPM,” “Native ASPM,” or “Link State Power Management” under Advanced > PCI Subsystem Settings (or Onboard Devices on some boards) and set it to Disabled.

Change 5: Check Legacy USB Support

This is the smallest, most situational change here, and it’s included because it’s the only one that touches the very first link in the latency chain: your mouse itself. Legacy USB Support routes USB input through an emulation layer built so a USB keyboard works before an OS finishes loading; with it on, some boards add a small but real amount of polling overhead to connected USB devices, mouse included, per scattered enthusiast testing threads on this exact setting — results aren’t consistent across motherboards, so treat this as “test it, don’t assume it.”

Disable it, confirm your mouse and keyboard still work outside the BIOS (most systems only need Legacy USB for the BIOS/UEFI screens themselves, not to boot Windows), and compare feel across a few ranked games. Once this is settled, the next lever in the peripheral stage is your sensitivity and DPI setting — see our best DPI for gaming guide for what pro players actually run.

Which of These Actually Matter for Your Setup?

Not every change here applies equally to every rig.

The Popular Tweak That Can Get Valorant to Block You

A huge share of “optimize Windows/BIOS for gaming” content tells you to disable Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) / Memory Integrity / Core Isolation, and the BIOS-level settings that enable it — Intel VT-x/AMD-V virtualization and IOMMU — for a few extra FPS. Don’t do this on Valorant. Riot’s Vanguard anti-cheat now runs an On-Demand mode, released June 2026, that bundles a “Pre-Check” requiring Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security, HVCI, and IOMMU enabled at the same time [9]; Riot’s own security page states that systems failing this check get a VAN:Restriction prompt to enable the features or update motherboard firmware “before you can play” [2].

Disable virtualization or IOMMU in BIOS to chase a generic FPS tip, and you’re not shaving off input lag — you’re risking getting locked out of the game entirely, with an error message that has nothing to do with the “improve gaming performance” article you followed. On-Demand is currently a tier for systems that qualify rather than an overnight blanket requirement, but the direction makes gambling these settings for FPS a bad trade. If Valorant already launches fine for you, leave these toggles exactly where they are.

Two more common “gaming BIOS tips” that don’t hold up here either. Disabling HPET (High Precision Event Timer) is repeated everywhere as a free FPS boost, but FPS overlays like MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner calculate frames using the same Windows timers HPET feeds — disable it and you can distort the system clock enough that the counter reads higher without the game actually rendering any faster, a measurement illusion rather than a real gain [10]. And toggling Fast Boot only changes how quickly your PC gets through POST on the way to the Windows login screen — it has zero effect on anything that happens after Valorant is already running, despite showing up on nearly every “gaming BIOS settings” list anyway.

Verified against Riot’s Vanguard On-Demand security requirements and general UEFI BIOS layouts as of September 2026. Exact menu names and paths vary by motherboard vendor — ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and ASRock all label several of these differently — so check your board’s manual if a menu name above doesn’t match exactly.

FAQ

Will disabling C-States hurt my CPU or void my warranty?

No — C-States are a firmware power setting, not an overclock, and won’t affect warranty coverage. The real tradeoff is heat and idle power draw: a CPU capped at C1 (or fully disabled) runs hotter at idle than one that sleeps normally, so the actual question is whether your cooling can handle a CPU that never fully powers down, not whether this damages the chip.

I enabled Resizable BAR and don’t see any FPS difference in Valorant — is it broken?

Probably not broken — this is expected. Riot’s engine is deliberately CPU-bound rather than GPU-bound [1], so the double-digit FPS gains you’d see in a GPU-heavy AAA title from Resizable BAR mostly don’t apply here. Confirm it’s actually active (GPU-Z reports “Resizable BAR: Enabled”) and leave it on for the smaller per-frame overhead reduction rather than expecting a benchmark-topping number.

Should I disable Core Isolation / Memory Integrity to reduce input lag?

Not on Valorant. Riot’s Vanguard On-Demand ties its access requirement to Virtualization-Based Security and HVCI being enabled — disabling either in BIOS or Windows risks a VAN:Restriction error that blocks the game outright [2], which costs far more than the marginal gain a generic “disable VBS” tip promises.

Sources

1. Riot Games (via Valorant Dev Tracker). Low GPU Usage but 99% CPU Usage? devtrackers.gg
2. Riot Games. VAN:Restriction and Closing the Motherboard Pre-Boot Gap for Vanguard. Riot Games
3. NVIDIA. How to Use the NVIDIA Reflex Analyzer. NVIDIA
4. CLX Gaming. The True Impact of RAM Speed on Competitive FPS. CLX Gaming
5. NVIDIA. GeForce RTX 30 Series Performance Accelerates With Resizable BAR Support. NVIDIA
6. MakeUseOf. My PC Had Annoying Frame Drops I Couldn’t Explain — Until I Found This Hidden CPU BIOS Setting. MakeUseOf
7. Blur Busters Forums. Exploring the Link Between C-States and Latency. Blur Busters
8. XDA Developers. Your BIOS Is Probably Throttling Your SSD, and a Single Toggle Can Fix It. XDA Developers
9. Wikipedia. Riot Vanguard. Wikimedia Foundation
10. Bottleneck Calculator. Stop Disabling HPET: The Truth About the 2% FPS Boost Myth. Bottleneck Calculator

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.