Riot Lets 35% of Players Run Vanguard On Demand With Windows 11 25H2

Q: How much gaming performance must players sacrifice to escape Vanguard's constant monitoring?

Players who switch to Riot’s new on-demand Vanguard mode may give up roughly 5% of gaming performance, with some reports putting the hit closer to 10% depending on the game and hardware. That trade-off does not come from Vanguard itself running only when a Riot game launches. It comes from the Windows security features Riot now requires for “Vanguard Pre-Check,” especially Virtualization-Based Security and Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity, along with Secure Boot, TPM 2.0 and IOMMU. Those protections help Windows block the kernel and memory exploits cheats rely on, allowing Riot to stop running Vanguard continuously from boot. Riot’s own announcement frames the change as an optional swap: players can reclaim freedom from constant background monitoring only if their PC meets those stricter security requirements. About 35% of players already do, while the rest would need to enable the settings manually, often in BIOS. The practical answer is that there is no fixed universal penalty, but the best outside estimates suggest a modest-to-noticeable performance cost rather than a severe one. On newer systems, the impact may be small enough to accept for players who dislike always-on anti-cheat. For competitive players chasing every frame, however, even a 5% drop can matter. So the price of escaping Vanguard’s constant monitoring is typically a small but real performance hit, not the loss of access to Riot games.

3 articles · Updated · The Verge · Jun 24

Starting today, eligible League of Legends and Valorant players can stop Vanguard’s kernel driver from launching at boot and have it run only while a Riot game is open.
Riot said the change is possible because Windows kernel security improvements developed with Microsoft now let Vanguard verify loaded drivers through Runtime Driver Attestation Report instead of running 24/7.
Windows 11 25H2, UEFI, Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, VBS, HVCI and IOMMU are required for the optional Pre-Check mode, which Riot says newer PCs often already have enabled.
About 35% of players already meet those requirements and can switch with their next update, while the other 65% must change system settings if they want on-demand mode.
Pre-Check remains optional, so players who do nothing can keep using Vanguard in its existing always-on configuration.