Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat now has an on-demand mode that only runs when you actually play

Riot Games has added an optional on-demand mode to Vanguard, the anti-cheat software running under League of Legends and Valorant. Instead of launching at system startup and sitting in the background all day, Vanguard can now activate only when you open a game and shut down the moment you close it — if your PC qualifies.

The catch is a hardware gate Riot calls the Vanguard Pre-Check. Head of anti-cheat Phillip Koskinas announced the change on June 24th, explaining that on-demand mode requires your system to meet a set of modern security requirements: Windows 11 25H2 or later, UEFI mode, Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security, Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity, and an enabled IOMMU. You may also need a BIOS update. Riot estimates around 35% of its weekly players are already on hardware in the Windows 11 secured-core state and can flip the switch immediately. About 3% are on older machines that won't qualify at all — for them, always-on Vanguard stays the only option unless they upgrade.

Vanguard has been a persistent source of friction since Riot introduced it with Valorant in 2020 and later extended it to League of Legends. The kernel-level driver running from boot was a specific complaint — players worried about the security surface it created and resented having anti-cheat software active even when they weren't playing. This on-demand mode is a direct response to that pressure, though Koskinas was candid that the option only works because eligible PCs are handing off some of that security responsibility to their own hardware and Windows' native protections.

Koskinas also signaled that Pre-Check will evolve over time, potentially adding more requirements — but Riot intends to keep things optional except for players in the most competitive brackets, on unusual hardware, or at the highest ranks. For everyone else, it's opt-in, and those who prefer the existing always-on setup can simply leave things as they are.