Valorant finally has Anti-Lag 2 support, meaning AMD GPU users with an RDNA (6000-series) GPU or later should now have something in-game that can compete with Nvidia’s latest latency reducing Reflex tech. That being said, I’ve tested it and think its benefits will be very system-dependent.
It’s worth noting that this feature has actually been in Valorant for a little over a week now, according to the 12.09 patch notes. However, it isn’t enabled automatically when you log into the game, so don’t assume that you’ve already had it enabled if you’ve been playing Valorant within the last week. You can toggle it on at the bottom of the main Graphics settings page.
I used an Nvidia Latency and Display Analysis Tool (LDAT) to compare the difference in latency between having the setting enabled and disabled. This tool measures the time taken between clicking and having your gun’s muzzle flash in-game. I tested each setting over 150+ clicks and averaged the results:
- Anti-Lag 2 OFF: 10 ms (934 fps)
- Anti-Lag 2 ON: 9.84 ms (921 fps)
As you can see, the difference isn’t great. Furthermore, when I tested latency with Anti-Lag enabled in the AMD driver and Anti-Lag 2 enabled in-game, I got a slightly higher result than in both the above cases (10.03 ms). I’m not sure whether enabling that in the driver actually overrides Anti-Lag 2 in-game, or whether it just demonstrates all the above is within the realms of natural variance.
Whatever the case, clearly the benefit to enabling the latency-reducing setting it is slim, provided you have a high-end AMD PC similar to mine. And that might be the kicker here. I’m using a rig with an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Anti-Lag 2 is primarily beneficial for less powerful rigs, because higher-end ones already have the entire input-to-display pipeline running very quickly, especially in a competitive game like Valorant.
So, if you have a lower-end rig, it might still be worth it. Though you should also bear in mind that enabling it can also lower your frame rate a little, making it a bit of a balancing act. In the practice range, enabling it barely dropped my average frame rate at all, but my 1% lows did drop from 565 fps to 489 fps, which was a little more significant.
It’s easy to toggle the setting off and on in-game, though, so it should be easy enough to try it out on your own rig.
