Riot Games has implemented various anti-cheat measures to maintain a fair gaming environment for Valorant players. One of these measures involves the use of Secure Boot. When Valorant was first released, players noticed that the game would not run on systems without Secure Boot enabled. This led to discussions and concerns among players regarding the requirement.
Some enterprise or rare OEM systems use their own Secure Boot keys instead of Microsoft’s. Valorant relies on Microsoft’s standard keys. If your firmware uses custom keys, Vanguard may fail to validate, requiring you to restore Microsoft defaults.
Every motherboard manufacturer has a different BIOS layout, but generally, you can find the setting under: does valorant require secure boot on windows 10
While the process of converting from Legacy to UEFI or digging through BIOS settings can be intimidating for casual users, it is a necessary step to ensure a cheat-free environment. Once enabled, you not only gain access to Valorant but also secure your PC against a host of boot-level threats.
In a statement regarding the update, Riot clarified that if a system does not meet these requirements, Vanguard will not initialize, resulting in the game failing to launch. Riot Games has implemented various anti-cheat measures to
Before you enable it, you should know what it does.
Valorant is a pioneer in enforcing Secure Boot, but it won’t be the last. Future anti-cheat systems from major publishers (EA, Activision, Epic) are likely to adopt similar requirements as: This led to discussions and concerns among players
The game will not proceed past the loading screen.
However, cheat developers have increasingly turned to "bootkits"—cheats that load before Windows even starts. To combat this, Riot updated Vanguard to require a security feature called (Trusted Platform Module) and Secure Boot .
With Riot Games taking a hard stance on anti-cheat security, many players are left wondering:
If you switch from Legacy to UEFI and your computer fails to boot into Windows (giving you a black screen or "No Boot Device" error), it means your hard drive is formatted as MBR. You will need to use the Windows mbr2gpt command-line tool to convert your drive to GPT to support UEFI and Secure Boot.