VALORANT Config: GameUserSettings.ini, and Why Engine.ini Does Nothing

VALORANT runs on Unreal Engine, so every Unreal tuning guide looks like it should apply. Almost none of it does: Vanguard sits below the game and rejects the overrides those guides are built on. Here is what is left, which is less than the internet suggests and more useful than nothing.

Last updated 1 August 2026 · VALORANT, Unreal Engine 4

Where the VALORANT config file is

It sits under your local app data rather than in the install folder. The file is GameUserSettings.ini, and it lives one folder deeper than people expect, inside a folder named after your account:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\VALORANT\Saved\Config\<PlayerID>\Windows

Paste that path straight into the Explorer address bar — %LOCALAPPDATA% expands on its own, so you do not need to know your username.

Note what is not here: nothing in the VALORANT install directory. Editing files there is both pointless and the wrong instinct for a game with kernel-level anti-cheat.

Why Engine.ini tweaks do nothing

No, and this is the single most important thing on this page. Vanguard blocks Engine.ini overrides, so the long [SystemSettings] blocks you find in Unreal Engine performance guides do nothing here.

Those guides are not wrong in general. In an ordinary Unreal game an Engine.ini with a [SystemSettings] section can reach past the menu and set renderer variables the game never exposes — shadow resolution, streaming pool size, anti-aliasing method. It is genuinely powerful, which is exactly why Riot closed it.

Two things happen when you try it in VALORANT:

• The keys are ignored, so nothing changes and there is no error to tell you.
• Or the file is rewritten on launch, so your edit is gone next time you look.

What GameUserSettings.ini can actually change

The documented user-settings keys, and the scalability groups. That is the whole surface, and it maps closely to what the in-game menu exposes — which is the point: you are writing the same settings the game would write, just precisely and all at once.

The section headers matter, because a key under the wrong one is ignored:

[/Script/Engine.GameUserSettings]
bUseVSync=False
FrameRateLimit=144.000000
bUseDynamicResolution=False
FullscreenMode=0
PreferredFullscreenMode=0

[ScalabilityGroups]
sg.ResolutionQuality=100
sg.AntiAliasingQuality=2
sg.ShadowQuality=0
sg.TextureQuality=2
sg.EffectsQuality=2

A few notes that matter more than the list:

• FrameRateLimit takes a float. 144.000000, not 144. This is Unreal's own format and the safest thing is to match it.
• FullscreenMode=0 is exclusive fullscreen, and it is the one worth insisting on: it gives the game the display outright rather than compositing through Windows, which is a real latency difference, not a placebo.
• sg.ResolutionQuality=100 means no internal downscaling. If you ever see a blurry VALORANT and cannot work out why, this is usually below 100.
• The sg.* values are steps, not percentages — roughly 0 low, 1 medium, 2 high, 3 epic. Setting sg.ShadowQuality=5 does not give you better shadows than 3.

The honest part: VALORANT is not graphics-limited

This is where VALORANT differs from every other game on this site, and it changes what you should bother with.

The game was built to run on a decade-old office machine. The art is deliberately simple, there is no dynamic lighting to speak of, and on any modern GPU you are producing far more frames than your monitor can show. Turning shadows down from high to low on a card that is already idle does not give you frames it was not already capable of.

So the two settings that genuinely matter are the two nobody makes videos about:

• The frame cap. Uncapped, the GPU renders 400 frames for a 144 Hz screen. The extra ones are thrown away, the card runs hot and loud to make them, and the interval between the frames you do see wanders. A cap slightly under what you sustain gives the pacer headroom — a steady 138 feels better than a spiky 400.
• Exclusive fullscreen. Above. Not a frame rate change at all, a latency one.

What is left after that is your CPU, and VALORANT is a CPU-bound game on most machines. If yours is the limit, no graphics setting in this file will move your frame rate much. Our bottleneck calculator is free, needs no account and takes about fifteen seconds — if it says CPU-bound at your resolution, set the cap sensibly and stop reading settings guides.

When VALORANT keeps resetting your file

The game rewrites GameUserSettings.ini when it saves settings, and on some installs it does so on every launch. If your values survive a restart, you are done and there is nothing more to do.

If they do not, the fix is to make the file read-only: right-click it → Properties → tick Read-only. Do this only if the values keep reverting, and know the cost — from then on the in-game menu cannot save anything either, so every change you make there lasts until you close the game. Untick it, change what you want in the menu, tick it again.

Sensitivity: why VALORANT's number is not comparable

Each engine turns your mouse a different amount per count, and the figure that describes it is the yaw value. VALORANT's is the outlier among shooters:

That ratio is why a sensitivity copied from CS2 feels roughly three times faster in VALORANT. Converting either way:

// CS2 -> VALORANT
valorant_sens = cs2_sens * 0.022 / 0.07   // so CS2 2.0 -> 0.63

// VALORANT -> CS2
cs2_sens = valorant_sens * 0.07 / 0.022   // so VALORANT 0.4 -> 1.27

Keep your DPI the same on both ends or the maths means nothing. Convert once, then leave it alone — the benefit of matched sensitivity is muscle memory, which you destroy by adjusting it every week.

Is editing the config safe with Vanguard running?

No, it cannot get you banned, because it is the game's own settings file. VALORANT writes to it itself every time you change an option in the menu, and editing it changes nothing about how the game runs — it changes what the game reads when it decides how to draw.

Vanguard is looking for something entirely different: drivers and processes that read or write VALORANT's memory, or that sit between your input and the game. A text file the game wrote and will write again is not in that category.

The reversibility test is the useful one here: put the old file back, launch, and everything is exactly as it was. That is also the reason to keep a copy.

Editing it yourself, in four steps

1. Close VALORANT completely, Riot Client included. A running game overwrites your edit the moment it exits.
2. Copy GameUserSettings.ini somewhere safe first.
3. Open the original in Notepad and change the values you want, leaving the section headers exactly as they are. Add nothing new — a key the game does not know is a key the game ignores.
4. Launch the game and check the video menu. Your values should be reflected there. If they are not, the file was rewritten and you need the read-only step above.

Where the numbers come from

The keys above are the general case. The ones that depend on your specific machine are the ones that matter most here: FrameRateLimit has to relate to what your hardware sustains and to your refresh rate, and the texture and effects steps depend on how much VRAM you actually have.

That is the part a guide cannot do for you, and it is what our generator does — you enter your CPU, GPU, RAM, resolution and refresh rate, and it writes the file with those numbers filled in, plus a report explaining each line. Only GameUserSettings.ini keys, because as above, nothing else applies.