Riot Games' Vanguard no longer starts on boot for supported PCs

Following the recent wave of DMA card bans by Riot Games, the video game company has finally decided to roll out a meaningful update to its Vanguard anti-cheat software. League of Legends and Valorant players can now turn off Vanguard anti-cheat via Vanguard: On-Demand whenever they’re not in-game. However, Vanguard: On-Demand requires players to meet a few key system requirements.

With the new Vanguard: On-Demand update, Vanguard will no longer start on PC startup. Instead, it will run only when you launch a Riot game, such as Valorant or League of Legends. After you finish playing, Vanguard will automatically shut down. This update has toned down criticism of Riot’s anti-cheat software, which previously always remained active as a background process.

Riot Games published the announcement in an official blog post on June 24, 2026, where Director of Riot’s Anti-Cheat Philip Koskinas stated:

“Starting later today, the universally beloved anti-cheat product, Vanguard, will begin to support on-demand sessions from all sufficiently secured PC devices. On-demand here means that Vanguard’s driver component will no longer launch when the system starts, but ‘secured’ indicates that this will be possible only if that system’s hardware has met a set of modern security requirements.”

He further stated, “By opting into pre-boot security mechanisms and Windows’ own native protection features, Vanguard can safely end its watch, and your taskbar can have 256 of its pixels back.”

To enable On-Demand mode, Koskinas stated, “The button to switch to on-demand mode will appear with your very next update, and as cool as you definitely thought the icon was, you will no longer have to see it in your system tray.”

However, only 35% of Riot Games’ player base meets the system requirements for on-demand mode. Players using a new machine in a “secured core” state will see a toggle to enable on-demand mode during the update.

The remaining 65% of the player base will need to complete a short checklist of Windows security features to manually enable. Gamers will have to update to Windows 11 version 25H2and enable Secure Boot, TPM 2.0,Virtualization-Based Security, Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI), and IOMMU. 

Newer PCs will already meet the prerequisite list of system requirements. However, the Vanguard Tray (VGTray) app will guide the remaining players by scanning their systems and showing them how to enable the required security features for On-Demand mode.

That leaves only 3% of the player base on older hardware who will have to rely on always-on mode. On-demand mode is entirely optional and will not affect or restrict gamers without the pre-check requirements from playing either Valorant or League of Legends.