After six years of players asking Riot to stop running its anti-cheat on their computers 24 hours a day, Valorant‘s Vanguard is finally getting an on-demand mode.
Vanguard has been a flashpoint since Valorant launched in 2020, specifically because it burrowed into your PC at startup and stayed there whether you were playing or not. While the community called it invasive,
Riot called it necessary, so for years, neither side moved much, though the argument never really went away, and players kept asking the same question: why does an anti-cheat need to run when the game isn’t even open?
Valorant’s Vanguard anti-cheat will no longer run when you’re not playing
According to a post published June 24 on the Riot Games website, Vanguard will now support an on-demand mode that keeps its driver dormant until you actually launch a Riot title.
The catch is that players need to meet a set of hardware and software requirements, collectively called “Vanguard Pre-Check,” which includes Windows 11 25H2, Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, IOMMU, and Virtualization-Based Security.
Riot says roughly 35% of its playerbase already qualifies, with that figure growing by one to two percent each month.
The reason this is finally possiblecomes down to new Windows functionality developed with Microsoft’s Xbox OS Security team. A feature called Runtime Driver Attestation now lets Vanguard verify that no cheat drivers loaded before the game launched, even if Vanguard itself wasn’t running to see them do it.
That’s the piece that made the always-on requirement feel unavoidable: without it, a cheater could load a vulnerable driver, strip it out, and leave no trace before Vanguard booted up. Now, the attestation report closes that gap natively.
For more on Riot’s recent anti-cheat moves, Vanguard made headlines in May after it rendered thousands of dollars worth of DMA cheat hardware unusable, with Riot joking the devices had become “$6K paperweights.”
