Before you all tilt at another Valorant topic, this one is actually very important as quite a few people who read these forums will eventually play the Valorant beta, and yes this relates to Overwatch in a huge way.
If you complain about this being valorant spam, then I will reply to you with 
Valorant Vanguard is a kernel driver that is installed and activated during your computer boot. Yes, it reads your files, it is pretty much spyware, but I have a point with this.
Valorant Vanguard is currently very buggy (the anti-cheat works fine) and it will causes a 1 second stutter every 10-30 mins on all of your daily computer activities. It even stutter while in the valorant practice range, but wonāt stutter in an actual game of valorant (vanguard probably executes all of the drivers properly at this point)
So, if you are playing Overwatch also, you will sadly have to uninstall riotās vanguard to not get screwed by the stutter.
Not all users experience this, but enough people reported it for it to get attention. I am waiting to hear back from Riot Support, as vanguard stuttering happens while internet browsing (and overwatch) and causes my computer start up to go from 15 seconds to 3 minutes.
So to all Overwatch players who might be playing valorant soon, be aware of vanguard potentially lagging your system
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Thatās a big yikes from me dawg
At the same time, it is a beta after all, people everywhere should probably stop treating it in their mind as a fully complete game, they should expect things like this
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To all the people that were spamming the forums with āJust add ring0 anticheat 4headā a few weeks agoā¦
I told you so.
Are other games affected by this also, or just Overwatch? Wouldnāt it be a terrible coincidence if the kernel driver from Valorant just happened to make a competing game perform badly? 
EDIT: Other games are affected too. *takes off tin-foil hat*
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Cāmon, we really have to resort to this?
Thatās some tin-foil hat you got there, how much did you get it for? I got mine for $5.
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Resort to what, accurate descriptions?
Source: https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046160933-What-is-Vanguard-
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Since you can read between the lines, I am experiencing cognitive dissonance right now.
I understand Riot is owned by Tencent which participates in surveilling consumers. So having such a deep piece of software at the kernel is very scary. All it takes is one exploit for someone to be able to do some very nasty things to peopleās computers.
The performance issue aside, I donāt trust Tencent. They admitted that the driver pretty much reads your files and also knows all of your computer drivers at start up (this is what would catch all modern cheats).
I just donāt know. If you are interested I can link the reddit discussion where a riot architect discusses their anti-cheat.
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Okay, I donāt really like it if something runs on boot like that.
But thereās probably a lot of stuff that do. Eh, my complaints are a (almost) moot point.
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Other games are affected. It affects all computer activity except for playing a game of valorant (not the valorant practice range).
The same kind of issue was very prevalent around the Epic Launcher too, a lot of security concerns, and I will find the discussion myself dont worry 
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Here is the link, you can miss it because the anti-cheat was only talked about by an architect because of this topic
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Epic denies it though
Like they can be trusted with whatever they say.
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What is your opinion on Vanguard? Is it pretty much tencent spyware? I am very torned.
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No program running in userspace (especially games) should need code running in kernel mode.
AI and machine learning (bots that literally spectate gameplay or watch replays to detect cheating) is the best path forward for anticheat. Game devs just need to put down some cash and hire some decent engineers to implement it. They wonāt though, because AI/ML engineers donāt come cheap and game publishers are notoriously cheap - itās easier to just violate your usersā privacy and screw up their computers instead.
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The concept behind it is that cheats are typically run before opening the game.
They chose to combat it by have the anti-cheat open at boot instead of with the game.
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Sadly iām not well-versed in this. If there is a computer security specialist here. They can explain.
All i know is Tencent is not to be trusted.
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That is a brilliant idea actually. There would be so many ways for an A.I to analyze footage to detect cheats to consistently ban cheaters and not have false positives.
This would pretty much cancel all of the lazy AHK color pixelbots, which was the aimbot everyone saw on day 1 of valorant as the architect explains that AHK is currently greenlighted by vanguard, although they will probably start implementing restrictions soon.
Trigger bots will also get owned by an A.I, it would be such a challenging code arms race at that point for cheat makers.
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There is this -
I hope Valve hire this guy.
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If they do, it would mean admitting VAC is crap.
Or maybe the dude is already hiredā¦ but then, TF2 wonāt be such a crap fest with the lag bots.
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So I have had a weird thing, after I installed Valorant, boom, i can hear footsteps normally in OW again, I have no idea whats going on, all my friends are like, āprofit you are calling footsteps, whats going onā and it clicked, I CAN HEAR FOOTSTEPS AGAIN AFTER 2 YEARS.
now there are point where it just doesnāt but it was 2-5% able to hear before and is now 90% of the time I can, no hecking clue why.
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Idk, was this after the background download? My footsteps got fixed awhile ago.
Then again, the vanguard literally plays with all of your drivers locked deep in the kernel mode. Maybe valorant vanguard turned on some random audio driver your computer forgot about lol
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