Valorant is Riot Games’ biggest release in the last few years. This FPS game hit the market with a large fan following from League of Legends, Overwatch, and CS:GO. While Valorant is optimized well to run on low-end PCs, sometimes it might fail to start because of various issues.
First of all, make sure that you meet the System Requirements posted by Riot Games. If you meet the requirements, you can try running the game as an administrator, or start it in compatibility mode. Changing your display resolution and restarting your PC might solve the issue. If all else fails, you can try to uninstall it and reinstall everything from scratch.
Valorant may not be starting because of a lack of resources from your PC, but if that ends up being a non-factor, then the first place to look for solutions is the Windows Settings. Let us take a look at the most commonly used solutions to this problem. We will move from the easiest solutions to the hardest.
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Check System Requirements
Before jumping into the solutions, we must first make sure that Valorant can even run on our system. While Valorant was designed with lower end computers in mind, to maximize the number of players that can play it, it still requires a reasonably competent CPU+GPU combo to function. These are the minimum and recommended system requirements for Valorant:
Minimum System Requirements (30 FPS)
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 or AMD Athlon 200GE
- Intel HD 4000 or AMD Radeon R5 200
- RAM: 4 GB
- Windows 7/8/10/11
Recommended System Requirements (60 FPS)
- Intel i3 4150 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200
- NVIDIA Geforce GT 730 or AMD Radeon R7 240
- RAM: 4 GB
- Windows 7/8/10/11
High End Requirements (144 FPS)
- Intel i5 9400F 2.90 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
- NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti or AMD Radeon R7 370
- RAM: 4-8GB
- Windows 7/8/10/11
End Process And Restart
There are various issues that can prevent Valorant from starting, but the simplest reason to rule out is an occasional bug preventing it from launching. Simply restarting all the processes might help rule out this issue if it is temporary. Follow these steps to end all Valorant Processes:
- Press the Ctrl+Shift+Esc buttons together to open the Task Manager.
- Now navigate to the “Details” tab at the top.
- Here you must find and end every single Riot Games, Valorant, and Vanguard process you can find.
- Once every process has ended, wait for a few seconds before relaunching the Valorant Client.
In case there were any updates that your game client failed to pick up beforehand, it should be able to connect to the Riot Games server and fetch details for any available updates this time. If an update is found, allow the client to fully update before launching the game.
Run As Administrator
- Locate your Valorant shortcut on your desktop, or whichever place you run the game from.
- Right Click the icon to open the menu.
- Now click “Run as administrator” to launch the game with administrator privileges.
If this solution ends up working out for you, then you might want to permanently change the settings of the Riot Games client and Valorant to always launch them as an administrator. Follow these steps to achieve that:
- Right Click the Valorant icon and click Properties.
- Now navigate to the “Compatibility” tab at the top.
- At the button, check the option that says “Run this program as an administrator”.
- Click OK to save the changes.
- Repeat the same steps for both the Riot Games Client and the Valorant executable file, in their respective installation locations.
Compatibility Mode
You can attempt to run the game in compatibility mode just to rule out the possibility. This might be especially useful if you just updated to the new Windows 11 and are struggling with games because of it. Follow these steps to run the game in compatibility mode:
- Navigate to your Valorant installation folder (By default: C:/Riot Games/Valorant/)
- Right Click your Valorant executable file and then click Properties.
- Navigate to the Compatibility tab.
- Now check the option that reads “Run this program in compatibility mode for:”
- From the menu present under it, select a previous version of Windows.
- Click OK to save the changes and try running the game.
Update Graphics Driver
- Search for “Device Manager” in Windows and open it.
- Now expand the category called “Display adapters”
- Now Right Click your primary GPU and select “Update Drivers”.
- Now click “Search automatically for drivers” and allow the process to find the best drivers for you. If your drivers are already up-to-date, the process will let you know.
- Alternatively, if you own an NVIDIA or AMD dedicated GPU, you can visit their respective websites and search for your GPU model to find the most recent drivers available for it.
Reduce Your Display Resolution
- Click the Start button and open Settings.
- In the settings, click the first icon called “System”
- From the left tab, click “Display”.
- Now from the right side, you can change the Display Resolution by clicking the Drop-down menu.
- First, try changing it to the resolution you have set in the game. If it still doesn’t work, continue to lower the resolution one step at a time.
Disable Your Antivirus
- Search for “Windows Security” and open it.
- Now click the first box that says “Virus & threat protection”.
- Scroll down until you see “Virus & threat protection settings”, and click “Manage Settings”.
- Now disable Real-time protection. Feel free to disable the rest of the settings as well.
- You can enable these settings again if this does not solve your problem.
Tweak Environment Variables
This solution might only work on newer generation Intel CPUs, so feel free to undo the changes if it does not help you. Just follow these steps:
- First of all, Search for “Environment Variables” in Windows.
- Click the option that says “Edit the system environment variables”.
- From the window that opens, Click the “Environment Variables” button.
- Now click the New button to create a new variable.
- Set the name to OPENSSL_ia32cap.
- Set the value to ~0x200000200000000.
- Save the changes.
Restart Your PC
If nothing else works, then it might be time to restart your PC and let it have a fresh start. Turning off your PC will shut down any programs that might be lingering in the background and causing disruption to the game. Restarting your PC allows you to eliminate any temporary errors that might be preventing your game from launching.
Uninstall And Reinstall
If you are still reading, chances are you haven’t found a solution yet. Unfortunately, the solutions listed above are the most common ones and tend to solve the problem for most players. If nothing else helps, then you should try uninstalling Valorant and Riot Games Client completely and reinstalling from scratch.
- Click the Start button and open Settings.
- Click the “Apps” button.
- Find and uninstall any Riot Games/Valorant programs you find, especially Vanguard.
- If you can not find them, you may also click “Programs and Features” in the top right.
- In the window that opens, look for the required entries. Right Click them and then click Uninstall.
- Once you are done uninstalling, or if you simply couldn’t find the programs in the list, you can navigate to the installation folder (By default: C:\Riot Games\).
- Delete the Riot Games and Valorant client.
This will completely remove Valorant from your PC. You can also use programs like Revo Uninstaller Pro to clean up any residual files. Once you are done, restart your PC. Now visit Valorant’s official website and downloaded the latest version of the game and install it from scratch.
Conclusion
Valorant might not start up if your system does not have enough resources to allocate to the game. However, if the game used to run fine and suddenly stopped working, then checking out the various settings listed above may help you tackle the issue and revert the game to a working state.
If you’re in need of some more how-to articles, here is an article on how to make agents talk in Valorant.
Also read: Valorant match length
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