Valorant lag and high ping: causes and fixes

Valorant's servers run at 128 ticks a second, so the game notices small things: a few milliseconds of jitter, one lost packet in a duel. Here's how to see exactly what your connection does in the game, what Network Buffering changes, and what fixes lag.

How Valorant connects you

Riot hosts Valorant's matches in data centres across Europe and carries much of the traffic on its own network, Riot Direct. Your ping is the distance to the data centre your match is in, plus the road your provider takes to Riot's network. The second part is the one that differs between neighbours, and between noon and nine in the evening.

With 128 updates a second, the server hears from you every 7.8 ms. A packet that arrives late or not at all is noticed at once, which is why Valorant feels unsteady on connections other games tolerate.

See your connection in the game

Open Settings → Video → Stats. Set these to show (text is enough):

• Network Round Trip Time: your ping to the match's server.
• Packet Loss: what never arrived, in either direction.
• Network RTT Jitter: how much the round trip wobbles. In Valorant this matters as much as the ping itself.

Play a few rounds and watch them in fights. A high, steady round-trip time means distance or a long route. Jitter and loss mean something on the way is queueing or dropping. Ping, jitter and packet loss explains what each one does in a shooter.

What Network Buffering does

Under Settings → General, Network Buffering trades delay for smoothness. On Minimum, you see other players as early as possible but every hiccup shows. Moderate and Maximum hold their movement back a little so it looks smooth through loss. On a clean connection, keep it at Minimum. If your connection drops packets, a higher setting can make the game easier to read, but it's a bandage: it adds delay instead of removing the loss.

What helps

1. Use a cable. Wi-Fi's jitter is exactly what Valorant shows most. Wi-Fi or Ethernet has more.
2. Keep the line quiet: uploads and big downloads in the home make packets queue.
3. Fix the router's queue (SQM, or QoS that's configured) on a shared connection.
4. Watch the time of day. Jitter that comes every evening is your provider's busy hours.
5. Change the route when your round trip is higher than your distance explains, or the jitter comes from beyond your home.

Where NoSpike fits

NoSpike's Valorant entry is a beta: its servers are still being mapped, so NoSpike may not carry all of a match's traffic yet. While you play, Valorant's page in the app says what it carries, and when a match is on a server NoSpike doesn't route, it shows your own ping to it and says "Match not routed" instead of someone else's figures.

Where it does carry the game, it measures your own route and the routes through its relays in Europe, and routes Valorant only when a relay is faster. It never moves you in the middle of a match unless the route fails.