Valorant will transition to Unreal Engine 5 in July 2025, Riot Games announced in a recent statement.
This move is expected to deliver a significant visual upgrade for the competitive shooter, which has earned widespread recognition among esports fans for its gunplay mechanics and Agent abilities.
For the uninitiated, Valorant has been running on Unreal Engine 4 since its initial launch in June 2020. Not only is it optimized to run on modest hardware, but it also consistently delivers 60+ FPS even on low-end PCs.
According to the dev team, the Valorant Unreal Engine 5 upgrade isn’t expected to change the overall feel of the game or core gameplay mechanics, but it will bring performance enhancements and enable faster patch downloads moving forward.
Alongside announcing the engine upgrade, Riot Games also confirmed a bunch of other exciting additions coming to Valorant in the near future. These changes include a new map, improved smurf detection, 2FA, and the long-anticipated replay system.
The first Valorant patch following the Unreal Engine 5 upgrade is expected to be a ‘significantly large download.’ It will be added to the game with the Valorant 11.02 update, which will hit the live servers towards the end of July 2025.
