Valorant laptop and desktop benchmarks

With its colorful comic book look, Valorant is reminiscent of Blizzard's online hit Overwatch at first glance, which also features a variety of characters and special abilities. But the playstyle of the title is more oriented at the classic CS:GO, which is definitely not a bad role model.

To be able to play Valorant, you will first have to create an account with the developer and publisher Riot Games. The US studio is familiar to many gamers through League of Legends. But in contrast to the famous MOBA game, the free-to-play shooter, which measures only around 10 GB, is quite beginner-friendly. Already after a short time you can jump into battles and achieve first successes. We would describe the controls as loosely fuzzy, although it's a bit annoying that your own figure moves more slowly when getting hit. Currently, Valorant contains four maps, which differ from each other both stylistically and in terms of layout, and which accordingly provide for variety.

The underlying technology should not knock anyone off their feet. Graphically, Valorant looks hardly better than the over 10 years old Team Fortress 2, to give an example. However, the convenient look has the advantage that the shooter runs on almost any "potato notebook" or "potato PC", although for a smooth gaming experience it should be at least 60 FPS (or better 100 FPS) - not least because of the first-person perspective.

Riot Games has divided the video options into three submenus. While the General tab takes care of the resolution and the picture mode (optional fps limit), the Graphics Quality tab offers more than 10 adjusting options. With the exception of the anisotropic filtering (1x to 16x) and anti-aliasing (MSAA or FXAA), all settings can be either switched on or off or controlled in the three stages low, medium and high.

Our screenshot below shows how the three stages change the optics. With lowest settings, the graphics quality suffers greatly. There is no restart necessary when changing the settings, which is great. We experienced no technical problems during our tests, except for the resolution (e.g. on 21:9 displays).