Network Buffering Valorant | Riot Valorant Guide - EU-Vietnam Business Network (EVBN)

An internet connection which suffers from constant packet losses is one of the biggest opponents of online competitive games. When it comes to low-TTK and tactical FPS like Valorant, it is able to be quite irritating to see your opponents teleporting from one part of the map to another. This is named ‘player popping’ and is by far one of the most annoying issues to deal with in competitive shooters.

It is exactly where the Network Buffering setting extends into the picture. You have to know that in Valorant, you have a 7.8125ms “buffer” time when you are rendering the rest of the players on your screen. According to Riot, it is a ‘new player setting’ which helps to smooth out player popping as much as possible.

HOW DOES NETWORK BUFFERING AFFECT GAMEPLAY IN VALORANT?

The Network Buffering setting in Valorant is more or less a necessary evil for the players with unstable connections that suffer from frequent packet losses. According to RiotStealthyJesus, he said that you can update this buffer to several huge amounts and have ultra smooth player movement, no matter your packet loss rate. However, there would be a massive peeker’s advantage, everyone else would obtain a whole 1-second jumpstart on you, and you would lose almost every gunfight. RiotStealthyJesus explains how the Network Buffering works in Valorant with the help of an image. If you want to see that image, you are able to look at this site.

Valorant players will be able to know how remote interpolation delay works. The players with unstable internet connections are going to have to select between a laggy gameplay experience or for the enemies to have massive peeker’s advantage over them. If you are not sure regarding how stable your internet connection, then Valorant comes with many settings which will display your network strength while inside the game. If you are experiencing packet losses, you are going to get a low Network Frames indication on the top-right hand corner of the screen, where you are going to look at other players in the game visiting around the map.

We think that it is better to switch Network Buffering on for poor connection. If you have a very stable internet connection, so keeping Network Buffering at a minimum will benefit you a lot more. But, if it suffers frequent packet losses, we recommend you switch Network Buffering on. It is very important to first play-test each of the buffering settings- Minimum, Moderate and Maximum- to check if your performance improves at all.

Here is what each of the settings signifies:

Minimum: There is going to be a 1-frame delay by default which is 7.8125ms and a complete 128 send rate will be sent from your system to the Valorant server.
Moderate: 3-frame delay which is roughly 23.4375ms, and a move data of 64-ticks are going to be sent to the servers.
Maximum: 5-frame delay that equals to 39.0625ms. 32-tick rates are sent to the server.