"Single largest performance gain for clients since launch": Valorant developer details the impact of Global Invalidation

Valorant's performance team at Riot Games has released an in-depth analysis of Global Invalidation, detailing its contribution to in-game performance boosts.

After being in development for months, the much-awaited Global Invalidation feature made its way into the game with Patch 4.03. This feature was introduced solely to enhance the performance of all in-game UI.

Aaron Cheney, a software engineer on Valorant's performance team, delves into the development and functioning of Global Invalidation to give the game's audience a glimpse at the big picture.

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Valorant developer shares data on the contribution of Global Invalidation to performance boosts

Aaron Cheney shared a graph that portrayed the improvement in in-game performance since the arrival of the Global Invalidation feature.

In the chart plotted below, each line represents a typical hardware configuration comprising a CPU and GPU from among the game's global player base. As per Riot Games' noting, this pairing is the best indicator to calculate expected performance.

Patch vs Average FPS chart (Image via Riot Games)

Furthermore, the data samples are taken only from Competitive and Unrated matchmaking queues, two of the most actively played game-modes. Data from games with under ten players has been excluded.

According to Riot Games,

"Global Invalidation has provided significant improvements for a large part of our player base. In fact, it’s the single largest performance gain for clients since launch."

Since the implementation of Global Invalidation, a gain of up to 15% has been noted for CPU-bound clients (primarily mid to high spec devices). This number does not represent moment-to-moment gameplay, but it brings about a noticeable difference to the user.

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How does Global Invalidation work?

Each digital asset shown in-game is a UI element or widget that needs to be rendered before being displayed. Multiple widgets need to be grouped into Invalidation boxes for the ideal performance of Valorant's UI, a process that involves several complications.

An example of various in-game UI elements or widgets (Image via Riot Games)

With the development of Global Invalidation, the game's UI performance has improved considerably. This has been done while reducing the manual labor imposed on the developers to organize widgets into individual Invalidation boxes.

While the Global Invalidation changes have been in development since early 2021, the Unreal Engine version 4.25 (which Valorant was running on) did not support the mechanism. With the version update being far away, Riot had no choice but to slow down.

Valorant Tech Lead Marcus Reid discusses the matter in an old Twitter thread.

After running a long chain of Global Invalidation playtests, identifying bugs, and fixing them, Riot Games succeeded in creating a stable environment for the feature.

Ultimately, since the feature's launch in Patch 4.03, the developers' team has maintained Global Invalidation by monitoring player reports for bugs while comparing performance data with estimated data.

Timeline for the Global Invalidation feature (Image via Riot Games)

Despite boasting tremendous improvements to the baseline performance of Valorant in CPU-bound PCs, this change differs concerning several individual factors unique to each user.