Shaders need to run well on this kind of older machine, but also we need to make sure higher-end machines don’t have a competitive advantage. VALORANT’s target minimum spec GPU is ambitious - it should run on an integrated GPU on a CPU from 2012… so basically what you’d find on a thin, light laptop from that era. For VALORANT, we picked these three pillars as the most important (instead of, say, realism, immersion, or cinematics) so we want to make sure we’re ending up evenly in the middle of this triangle. We want to make sure we’re hitting these pillars equally to create a visually appealing game that’s competitive and extremely performant.Įach game has different pillars depending on what the development team is trying to accomplish. Our three main pillars for VALORANT are the three elements mentioned above - performance, competitive integrity, and art. The Whole TriangleĮverything you see in a game of VALORANT uses a shader to render the pixels on your screen. And remember, VALORANT is a competitive game, so we also need to consider how realism and performance factor into competitive integrity. Shaders have to cut corners and fake effects, so we often find ourselves making a critical tradeoff: realism vs performance. This can be challenging because games have tight performance requirements - each frame must render in 6.9 milliseconds or less to hit a 144 FPS quality bar. With shaders, we’re basically simulating light physics. This raises many other more complex questions - for example, there’s a great deal of active graphics research into how we best represent physics within a computer. The BalanceĬomputer graphics for video games have a simple goal - create an image that visually represents a world.
I’m excited to talk about this because the intersection of engineering, art, and design is a personal passion of mine. Shaders are the programs behind what most people consider a game’s graphics - how a program running on your GPU takes in scene/game data and creates the pixels seen on screen. I’m specifically going to focus on shaders, which are an essential part of computer graphics, my area of expertise. Art style is related to several aspects of game design - sometimes it means shaders that affect visibility in light/dark environments, and sometimes it means UI considerations like details in a playable space and off-screen clutter. I’ll be talking about gameplay clarity in VALORANT, and how we balance art style, performance, and game integrity. We’re responsible for taking requests from artists and designers when they require deep game engine changes. Hi, I’m Brandon “mochi” Wang, a software engineer on VALORANT’s Content Support team.
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