Your Valorant game is running slowly on your laptop with many frame drops.
Your Valorant game is running slowly on your laptop with many frame drops.
It’s often tricky to match hardware specs with a random YouTube clip. You don’t always have the exact same setup, and it’s hard to know if the video is just showcasing the gear. Based on what I’ve heard before, this is the core issue I’m certain about. This is your main concern, and I can confirm it clearly. The challenge here is that if you can’t reduce usage (which seems unlikely), you won’t see much improvement in performance. Sorry, but this looks like a CPU bottleneck. For context, the 8400 runs significantly faster (~60%) compared to the 2500u, so it’s possible the person in the video never reaches full capacity on any core. This isn’t a tough game, and fixing it usually means lowering settings rather than changing hardware.
To observe this effect, apply MSI Afterburner overlay which clarifies the link between CPU load and frame rates. Occasionally a configuration reduces CPU usage, which is beneficial—though I still suggest setting a framerate cap for a smoother experience. It’s crucial to monitor CPU usage across every core/thread and GPU usage, along with frame rates (even if this game runs on just one core, the overlay layout provides all the typical data you’d expect).
Interestingly, while playing Valorant, I frequently hovered over Task Manager to check CPU usage. This time it was thread 8, indicating a bottleneck, not thread 1. Even more odd, after checking CPU percentages via Afterburner and RTS in-game, none of the values reached 100% or exceeded 90%.