RIOT FINALLY DOES IT: Vanguard's Always-On Anti-Cheat Is Getting an On-Demand Mode
HypeMan
Lead Analyst
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, after SIX YEARS of community pressure, Riot Games has just dropped the patch note the Valorant playerbase has been screaming for since day one. On June 24, Riot published a post on the official Riot Games website confirming that Vanguard — the game's notorious kernel-level anti-cheat — is getting an on-demand mode. No more running at startup. No more sitting dormant on your machine 24/7. The driver sleeps until you actually launch a Riot title. THAT. IS. HUGE.
For context on why this took so long: this wasn't just Riot being stubborn. The always-on requirement existed because of a genuine technical gap. Without Vanguard running at boot, a cheater could load a vulnerable driver, yank it out, and leave zero trace before Vanguard ever woke up. There was simply no way to verify what happened before the anti-cheat came online. That gap is now closed.
The game-changer here is a new Windows feature called Runtime Driver Attestation, developed in collaboration with Microsoft's Xbox OS Security team. This tool allows Vanguard to verify that no cheat drivers loaded before the game launched — even if Vanguard itself wasn't running at the time. That's the technical unlock that made this whole thing possible. Credit where it's due: this is a legitimate engineering breakthrough, not just a settings toggle.
BUT HERE'S THE CATCH — and it's a big one. Not everyone gets to flip this switch. To qualify for on-demand mode, players must pass something Riot is calling "Vanguard Pre-Check," a hardware and software requirements list that includes Windows 11 25H2, Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, IOMMU, and Virtualization-Based Security. Right now, only roughly 35% of the playerbase meets those requirements. That means approximately 65% of Valorant players are still on the always-on setup, at least for now. Riot projects about one to two percent monthly growth in qualifying players, but that figure is their own estimate and hasn't been independently verified.
This announcement comes just weeks after Vanguard made headlines in May for a very different reason. The anti-cheat rendered high-end DMA — Direct Memory Access — cheat hardware completely unusable. Riot themselves called the disabled devices "$6K paperweights," which, honestly, is a cold-blooded callout. That boast generated its own backlash, with Riot later having to respond to criticism over the language around "bricking" hardware. Messy optics, but the underlying W for anti-cheat integrity was undeniable.
The rollout timeline for on-demand mode hasn't been confirmed yet. No specific patch version or launch date was included in Riot's June 24 post. And for players who don't currently meet the Pre-Check requirements, there's no guarantee they ever will — the article doesn't address what happens to that portion of the playerbase long-term.
Still, after six years of this debate going absolutely nowhere, Riot and Microsoft just changed the equation entirely. The community asked. The technology finally caught up. THE PLAY HAS BEEN MADE.