Valorant frame (FPS) drops after 1.01 patch and how to fix it

Valorant, Riot's tactical first-person shooter, is officially out of beta for almost three weeks now, but the game still has many issues and bugs that need to be fixed.

And while Valorant patch 1.01 brought a lot of fixes and solutions, unfortunately, it also came with a set of new issues and bugs that are making players' experience worse.

One of the biggest problems players are encountering are sudden frame drops. Players are reporting massive frame drops and sound stuttering, even with the best, high-end PCs and they don't know what's the issue.

Even the players with high-end PCs are reporting issues with frame drops since (Picture: Riot Games)

Fortunately, a Reddit user that goes by the name mackfun seems to have a solution for this issue. Apparently, the problem is that after the latest patch, Valorant is now using only one CPU core, and he explains how to fix this.

You should follow these steps to check or fix the issue:

1. Launch Valorant, and minimize the game.

2. Open your Task Manager (by right-clicking the Windows Task Bar and clicking "Task Manager").

3. Click "More Details", and select the "Processes" tab.

4. Right-click Valorant, and select "Go to details".

5. Right-click "VALORANT-WIN64-Shipping.exe", and select "Set Affinity".

6. A window will pop up showing which CPU threads are currently enabled for Valorant. If they're all checked, this fix probably doesn't apply to you. If there's only a couple checked off and everything else is unchecked? Check the box "<All Processors>", and click OK

7. Repeat step #5 and 6, but on "VALORANT.exe"

(Picture: Riot Games)

According to comments in this Reddit thread, this will indeed fix your problems with frame drops in Valorant. 

Mackfun says that he is not sure if the issue is due to the new patch 1.01 or a Windows Update, but he explains that you will need to do this again whenever you start playing the game again since the problem is constantly resetting.

Hopefully, Riot will fix this annoying issue with the new patch, that should be out next week and it will bring Ranked Play.