{"id":515932,"date":"2026-06-29T02:35:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T02:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/515932\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T02:35:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T02:35:12","slug":"vanguard-no-longer-has-to-run-at-startup-thanks-to-riots-new-on-demand-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/515932\/","title":{"rendered":"Vanguard no longer has to run at startup thanks to Riot’s new On-Demand mode"},"content":{"rendered":"

I stopped playing Valorant a while back, but Riot’s Vanguard anti-cheat has been running at boot ever since, whether I play or not. That is finally changing. Riot Games has announced Vanguard On-Demand, an update that stops the Vanguard driver from loading at Windows startup. With Vanguard On-Demand, the anti-cheat runs only when you launch a Riot title like Valorant or League of Legends. Once you close the game, Vanguard shuts down automatically. But there is a catch.<\/p>\n

The catch is a security checklist Riot calls Vanguard Pre-Check. To switch to on-demand mode, your PC needs to be running at least Windows 11 25H2<\/a> with Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security, Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity, and IOMMU all enabled.<\/p>\n

What makes On-Demand possible is the work Riot did with Microsoft’s Xbox OS Security Team on a Windows feature called Runtime Driver Attestation Report, which keeps a record of every driver loaded since startup. From there, Vanguard can check at launch whether anything suspicious was loaded while it was inactive.<\/p>\n

Riot anti-cheat lead Phillip Koskinas said around 35% of players already meet all the requirements out of the box. Those players will see a toggle appear with their next update. The remaining 65% will need to manually enable the required settings, most of which are BIOS options. Around 3% are on hardware too old to qualify at all.<\/p>\n

\"Vanguard<\/p>\n

VIEW GALLERY – 2 IMAGES<\/p>\n

Koskinas was clear that Riot is not forcing anyone to change anything, and players who do nothing will have Vanguard continue to run exactly as it does today. On-Demand mode does not change whether you can play Valorant or League of Legends, no matter if you qualify or not.<\/p>\n

The always-on behavior has been one of the biggest frustrations<\/a> with Vanguard since it launched alongside Valorant in 2020. That said, players switching to the On-Demand mode should be aware that VBS and HVCI, two required Windows security features, run parts of the system kernel in a hardware-protected area, and enabling them can cause a small drop in FPS. VBS also activates Microsoft’s vulnerable driver blocklist, which may cause older device drivers to stop working.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I stopped playing Valorant a while back, but Riot’s Vanguard anti-cheat has been running at boot ever since,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515933,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[85,46,125],"class_list":["post-515932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}