Riot employee opens up about Valorant’s “garbage collection” and frame drops in the Shooting Range

The Shooting Range in Valorant has been having some problems with frame rates of late, and it could have something to do with what a Riot employee calls “garbage collection.”

There have been many instances recently when players noticed that the frames dropped drastically in the Shooting Range every time a new bot spawns.

In a recent Reddit post, a Valorant player who goes by the handle of the_banana_eater posted a video to show just how significant the frame spikes are in the Shooting Range.

In the post, the Redditor writes,

“Does anyone get a frame drop for every bot you kill in the range? It doesn't happen all the time as you can see in this video but it happens more often than not when a new bot spawns in. Doesn't happen to me at all in actual games.”

Subsequently, a Riot employee who goes by the handle of Koalifier replies to the post and says that the Valorant devs are trying to get fixes for the Shooting Range to improve its performance. However, as compared to the main game, he says that it’s at a very low priority and that there might not be a solution to it anytime soon.

Riot employee speaks of “garbage collection” in Valorant’s main game

In the Reddit thread, Koalifier opens up about Valorant’s game architecture and what the devs like to call “garbage collection” which helps with performance.

Koalifier says,

“This issue is probably related to a sort of consequence of the game's architecture. We need to do something called "garbage collection" periodically, which is where we tell the game to kick out stuff that's loaded into memory that doesn't need to be there anymore. In normal modes, we force this to be done on the round resets so that it doesn't impact gameplay at all (which is also why you might see your graphs dipping when the round swaps over to a new one). This is why you might get this issue in the range but not in actual games.”

Unlike in the main game, Valorant’s Shooting Range doesn’t exactly get a round reset, where the game will be able to do away with some of the stuff which is not required.

Hence, the memory caps out from time to time, and Valorant’s system will need to “dynamically kick something out and replace it with the new thing, which can cause dips like these.”

Koalifier suggests that one fix to this problem would be to just exit the shooting range and log back in, as this would force Valorant to conduct “garbage collection.”

The Shooting Range frame drop is not exactly a very pressing concern for the Valorant community, but judging by the number of upvotes the post got, it’s still an annoying issue for many. And Riot might need to fix it in the upcoming patches.

eed to fix it in the upcoming patches.