Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat finally goes on-demand — no more running at startup

Riot Games is changing how Vanguard works: starting today, the anti-cheat will no longer launch automatically when your PC boots. Instead it runs only when you're actually playing a Riot game, then shuts down when you're done.

Anti-cheat chief Phillip Koskinas announced the change, calling it "on-demand sessions." The catch is that your PC needs to meet a set of modern security requirements before the option appears. About 35% of Riot's players already qualify and will see the toggle show up automatically after the update. Everyone else needs to be on Windows 11 25H2 or later with UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, VBS, HVCI, and IOMMU all enabled — which likely means a trip into your BIOS. Around 3% of players are on older hardware that simply can't meet those requirements, so on-demand mode won't be available to them at all unless they upgrade.

Vanguard has been a sore spot since it launched in 2020. It's kernel-level software — meaning it runs at a very deep level of your system — and unlike the anti-cheat in games like Genshin Impact or Call of Duty, it ran constantly in the background from boot-up rather than only during gameplay. That persistent presence drew sustained criticism from players who didn't love the idea of Riot's software sitting on their machine 24/7. Koskinas said it took this long because the hardware ecosystem needed to mature enough to support the security guarantees that make on-demand mode safe to offer.

If you're happy with how Vanguard already works and have been playing Valorant or League of Legends without complaint, you don't need to do anything — the current behavior stays as the default. For everyone else who's been waiting years to reclaim those 256 taskbar pixels, the option is finally here.