Press F10 to save. Your PC will restart. Launch VALORANT. The red screen should be gone.

Riot has been transparent about why they did this. In a 2022 developer blog, they stated: “We cannot compete with cheaters if we only fight them in user-mode. We have to fight them at the firmware level, or we lose.”

In 2020, Riot Games released Vanguard—a kernel-level driver. This means Vanguard runs at the same core privilege level as your operating system’s kernel. Scary? Potentially. Effective? Undeniably.

Since every motherboard brand (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc.) has a different layout, use these general steps to find the settings:

Secure Boot acts as a gatekeeper that prevents this compromise from occurring in the first place. Secure Boot is a security standard developed by members of the PC industry to help make sure that a device boots using only software that is trusted by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). When a computer starts, the firmware checks the signature of each piece of boot software, including UEFI firmware drivers, EFI applications, and the operating system. If the signatures are valid, the machine boots, and the firmware passes control to the operating system.