Riot is giving its “beloved” Vanguard, the kernel-level anti-cheat behind Valorant and League of Legends, an optional on-demand mode. Instead of loading the moment Windows boots and sitting in your system tray around the clock, the driver can now launch only when you start a Riot game and shut down once you’re done. That always-on requirement has been the main sticking point for players since Vanguard arrived alongside Valorant in 2020, so this is Riot’s answer to it, even if there’s a catch.
The catch is a set of modern security requirements Riot calls Vanguard Pre-Check. To switch the driver to on-demand, your PC has to be on at least Windows 11 25H2 with features like Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, and virtualization-based security turned on, among a few others. Riot says about 34 percent of players already meet everything out of the box, most of the rest can get there by flipping some BIOS settings, and around 3 percent would need a hardware upgrade to qualify at all. None of it is mandatory, though. If you do nothing, Vanguard keeps running exactly as it does now, even if it likes crashing your PC (like it does mine).
What makes the switch possible is work Riot did with Microsoft, specifically its XBOX OS Security Team. Newer Windows builds add a Runtime Driver Attestation Report that lets an anti-cheat check, through the system’s TPM, which drivers loaded since boot, even if the anti-cheat wasn’t running to watch it happen. That closes the old “who loads first” gap that previously forced Vanguard to start at boot just to be sure no vulnerable driver had snuck a cheat into the kernel before the game launched.
For the bigger picture, Riot says cheaters currently turn up in about 0.7 percent of PC ranked matches across both games, with kernel-level cheating still the most common method and AI steadily lowering the barrier to making new ones. The full breakdown is a 7,000-word post from Riot anti-cheat lead Phillip Koskinas, packed with jokes alongside the technical detail. For anyone who wants the whole story, including the hardware features behind Pre-Check and how each cheating method works, Riot’s write-up has all of it.
