Best Valorant Settings and Options

Valorant is one of the hottest competitive games on the market right now. Riot is a developer that’s no stranger to the world of esports and competitive gaming. It stands to reason that their first foray into the world of precision-based tactical FPS’s has a robust set of settings to help you optimize your game.

 The setting menus can seem quite daunting at first so we’ve put together a guide on how to best optimize your Valorant settings for your mouse, minimap, crosshair, and graphics. Our guide is based on what the majority of competitive players and pros use but there’s a good amount of flexibility for you to further personalize your setup.

Best Valorant Settings - Mouse Settings

We don’t need to tell you how important precision is for a game like Valorant. Landing your shots where it counts can literally mean the difference between victory and defeat. But even that isn’t 100% enough. Enemies can pop out from out of nowhere in the blink of an eye. If your mouse settings aren’t set to complement your reactions, then your accuracy won’t help. What you need to achieve with your Valorant mouse settings is a balance between precision and flexibility. To reach that balance, you have to adjust three main settings.

Mouse Acceleration

This pesky little setting is actually not within Valorant’s options set. It’s a Windows thing that you’ll need to first turn off if you want to set up your mouse properly. In essence, mouse acceleration is your operating system’s way of helping improve your cursor’s precision. Sounds like it would actually be helpful in an FPS, right? In reality, it’s quite the opposite. It’s an automation that’s designed specifically for day-to-day tasks, not landing headshots. When you’ve got the perfect shot lined up, the last thing you want is Windows thinking you need to move a few pixels to the left, missing your opponent’s noggen in the process.
To turn off this nuisance of a setting, follow these steps:
  1. In Windows, select your Start button or press the Win key on your keyboard
  2. Start typing “mouse settings” until you see Change your mouse settings appear on your start menu. Select it.
  3. Select Additional mouse options on the righthand side
  4. In the window that pops up, select the Pointer Options tab
  5. Here, you should see Enhanced Pointer Precision checked. Uncheck it.
  6. Select Apply, then Okay to exit.
best mouse settings for valorant

DPI & Mouse Sensitivity

The term DPI stands for dots per inch and it refers to how much screen distance your mouse covers when you move it a single inch. Contrary to what some manufacturers may have you believe, a higher value doesn’t equal better in a game like Valorant. It’s a personal preference. Some players prefer values in the lower end of the spectrum, such as 400-500, while others want to be able to flick their wrists to perform full 180s at 4000 DPI. Regardless, the best way to think about DPI is in terms of sensitivity. The higher you set it, the faster your mouse will feel.
400
56%
800
22%
other
22%

What you’ll need to pay attention to here is that you’ve got two different settings to adjust. One is within Valorant’s mouse settings options and the other is in your mouse’s software. You don’t want one canceling the other one out. What we recommend is that you first set your mouse settings within its own software and then adjust the sensitivity within the game. As for which are the best values, it’s all down to personal preference. However, lots of pro players have seen great success with low DPI at 400-800 and sensitivity no higher than 1. It may feel unnaturally slow at first but with enough practice, you’ll find that it pays off.

Now that we have adjusted our three core mouse settings, we’re ready to move onto our Valorant minimap settings.

other
53%

Best VALORANT Settings - The Minimap

The key to mastering most competitive games is to develop your map and situational awareness. Both of these are facilitated through Valorant’s minimap that serves two purposes: to show you the lay of the land and to give you an idea of where enemies may be. Valorant has a particularly robust set of options to help you adjust its minimap. The settings you want to shoot for are those that give you the ability to check the minimap and at glance know what’s going on. Setting your Valorant minimap appropriately can also be vital when using Agents like Breach, Sova, and Viper due to their ability kit.

Now that we understand the importance of adjusting minimap settings, let’s look at each option individually.

Valorant minimap settings

Rotate

This is best set to Rotate as it orients the map to the direction you are facing. By doing this, you can better understand where enemies are when bullets start flying. Setting this to Fixed can be useful if you are focusing on learning maps but will only hinder you when you aim to maximize performance.

Keep Player Centered

Set this option to Off so that you can have a complete view of the entire map. Turning it on will effectively keep minimap’s focus on your character icon, effectively cutting off a portion of the map. This can be particularly dangerous if an enemy bleep comes up and their location is outside your minimap view.

Minimap Size

This will mostly come down to personal preference and screen size. A good rule of thumb is to leave this set to 1 and increase or decrease in a trial-and-error fashion if necessary.

Minimap Zoom

Similar to player centering, this option can cut out parts of the map if you set it too high. The best rule of thumb here is to set it no higher than 0.9 to avoid this happening. From there on, adjust in a way that makes everything as clear to you as possible.

Minimap Vision Cones

Definitely set this option to On as it will show you where your teammates are facing. This is invaluable information when it comes to teamwork as it shows you at a glance where your team’s blind spots are. It’s also great at telling you what your teammate’s intentions are in terms of their choice of cover.

Show Map Region Names

Not specifically about the minimap but it’s absolutely essential to set this to Always. After doing so, when you bring up the map by hitting M, you’ll see the callout names for each region on the map. On top of that, you’ll see the callout for your specific region directly below the map.

That does it for minimap settings in Valorant. Time to move onto crosshair settings.

Best Valorant Settings - The Crosshair

Crosshair Color

The color of your Valorant crosshair is what makes it stand out from what’s going on in front of you at any given time. The entire color set on offer is designed to stand out but there are a few colors the pros are using that edge the rest out. These are green, white, and cyan. If we were to choose the absolute best, it would be green as it clashes the least with the colors found in Valorant’s maps. An exception here is Viper because of her Ultimate so if you play her a lot and you are fussy, then maybe white might work best.

Inner Lines

This is arguably the most important set of settings as it determines the shape and prominence of your crosshair. Based on what most pros are using, here are the best inner lines settings for your Valorant crosshair:

● Opacity: 1 – Keeps crosshair as solid as possible so it’s always visible
● Length: 4 – The sweet spot of keeping the crosshair prominent without being distracting
● Thickness: up to 2 – This will come down to preference but anything more than 2 makes the crosshair incredibly thick and may be distracting
● Offset: 2: This will bring your crosshair lines closer while still giving you enough space to see what you are aiming at.

General -> Outline Settings

This comes down to personal preference and aiming style. One thing to note about having this On is that it effectively makes your crosshair bigger. This can potentially be counter to what you are achieving with your inner lines settings. The majority of pros have this Off but there are quite a few that turn it on. Those that do use it have opacity and thickness set to 1. Your choice will come down to how well these black outlines help you keep tabs on your crosshair.

Center Dot

Based on our Inner Lines Offset value, having a center dot is redundant so it’s best to set it to Off. However, if you’re using a wider offset value, you may want to experiment with turning it on.

Outer Lines

The purpose of outer lines in Valorant is to act as “training wheels” for newer players to better understand how their aim is affected by movement. No surprise here that all pros here turn this off as they can be distracting.

Fade Crosshair With Firing Error

Another distraction that pretty much all Valorant competitive players set to Off. What this does is that it fades away the top inner line of your crosshair the more you spray your gun. You likely already know your aim is quite bad when spraying so it’s best to just turn it off.

Movement Error and Firing Error

Simple stuff here. If you’re a beginner, go ahead and turn these training wheels on as they will make your crosshair expand and detract when you move and fire. This way you can get a feel for how accuracy works in Valorant. Competitive players and pros keep both Off.

With the crosshair settings out of the way, it’s time to dive into one of the most important set of settings in competitive Valorant: graphics.

Best VALORANT Settings - The Graphic Settings

Valorant is a fast-paced action game. As such, the way things move on the screen is vital for optimizing your game. Tweaking your graphics settings is all about getting the best possible performance out of your PC and monitor. That means having optimal frames per second (fps). While Valorant is designed to be playable even on a budget, you’ll likely want to opt for lower quality graphical fidelity that ensures high fps. Our settings below will ensure that you get the best possible performance. You can opt to set some of these higher if your rig is a beast.

  • Display Mode: Fullscreen – Who wants to play on a tiny window anyway?
  • Resolution: Select Native resolution here to get your monitor’s highest possible setting
  • Frame Rate Limit: Unlimited – There’s no point in setting a limit as the higher the fps the smoother your animations
  • Material Quality: Medium will keep your performance optimal even with a budget gaming rig.
  • Texture Quality: Same as Material Quality, Medium
  • Detail Quality: You’ll want to experiment with this. Start by setting it to High and if you see fps dips, drop it to Medium
  • UI Quality: Low – It still does its job without looking too fancy
  • Vignette: Off
  • Vsync: Off
  • Anti-Aliasing: MSAA 2x or 4x – You’ll have to experiment but lower always means better performance
  • Anisotropic Filtering: 8x or 4x – As above, experiment.
  • Improve Clarity: Off
  • Bloom: Off
  • Distortion: Off
  • First Person Shadows: Off – These aren’t all that necessary so cutting them out squeezes out that much more performance.

The above settings don’t make the game look its prettiest, admittedly. However, competitive players always value their game’s performance over its beauty. One other tip is to invest in a high refresh rate monitor if you can afford one or can save up for one. Your monitor’s refresh rate is what actualizes the smooth animations you see. Going for something that can at least hit 144 Hz should be your go-to for getting the most optimal competitive edge in Valorant.

Click here for a list of Valorant Pro Gamer’s and their Settings