Should Raw Input Buffer be on or off in Valorant?

On, and since September 2025 you cannot turn it off. Riot's patch 11.06 notes say the RawInputBuffer setting "has been removed and is no longer configurable" and "will be enabled at all times for players because it is more performant". If you are looking for the toggle under General and Mouse and it is not there, that is why. And if you are deciding whether you lost something: you did not. Raw Input Buffer was never a latency setting.

What Riot changed, patch by patch

The setting existed for almost four years, and most of the guides about it were written while it did. Three patch notes cover its whole life:

Read the 3.07 line twice, because it settles the argument before it starts. Riot promised the same input latency with the buffer on. What changed was performance, meaning CPU time spent handling the mouse.

Why two answers circulate

The advice you will still find says to turn the buffer on with a mouse above 1000 Hz and keep it off with a cheaper one. Inven Global's explainer, dated 31 January 2025, puts it as "turn on VALORANT's input buffer if you have a gaming mouse with a max polling rate above 1,000 Hz". Nothing in Riot's notes supports the "off" half. For an ordinary gaming mouse they describe a minor improvement and identical latency, which is not a reason to switch anything off. Since 11.06 the question is moot either way.

The other confusion is the word "buffer". Players hear it as a queue that holds input back, which would add delay. It is the opposite: the input is already waiting, and the buffer is a way to collect all of it in one go.

What the buffer actually does

Riot does not name the Windows function, but the setting's name matches what Microsoft calls a buffered read. In Microsoft's "Using Raw Input" page there are two ways to read a mouse. In a standard read, each report arrives as its own WM_INPUT message and is read on its own. In a buffered read, those messages stay in the queue, and GetRawInputBuffer "performs a buffered read of the raw input messages data" and removes them all together. Microsoft says the buffered pattern "is well-suited for game loops and other applications that process input at a fixed rate", and recommends draining the queue this way "for high-frequency devices such as mice at 1000Hz".

Polling rate decides how much there is to drain. A game reads input once per frame, so divide reports per second by frames per second:

This is the shape of Riot's claim. At 1000 Hz and 240 fps there are about four reports a frame, and reading them one at a time or in one call makes little difference. At 8000 Hz there are 33, every frame, and the per-report overhead is paid 33 times unless the reads are batched. Riot published no frame rate figures for the improvement, so we can tell you where the work is but not how many fps it saves.

Not the same as Overwatch's option

Overwatch's "Enable High Precision Mouse Input", added on 5 November 2019, gets lumped in with Raw Input Buffer and does something different. Blizzard's patch notes say it lets the game "use your mouse's native polling rate when determining exactly where to shoot". Gameplay engineer Derek Mulder's forum post explains that Overwatch "simulates (or ticks) every 16 milliseconds, or at 62.5Hz", so at 1000 Hz there can be "as many as 16 discrete mouse movements" between ticks, and with the option on a shot can use any of them. That changes what the game does with your aim. Valorant's buffer changes how the game collects it, with, in Riot's words, identical latency.

What still matters with a high polling rate

The buffer removes one cost of 8000 Hz inside Valorant. It does not remove the USB interrupts the CPU still handles below the game, which is why our polling rate guide recommends checking 1% lows at 1000 Hz and at 8000 Hz before keeping the higher rate. The gain on the other side is small: 1000 to 8000 Hz shortens the mean polling delay by 0.44 ms. Watch a frame time graph rather than the average, as explained in frame time vs fps. Raw input itself is a different setting from the buffer and is part of the input path checklist, and the rest of the delay between your hand and the screen is mapped in the click-to-photon chain.

Where this stops applying

Everything here is about Valorant on Windows PC: the setting and its removal are PC-only, per 11.06. Riot gave no figures for either improvement, and we have not measured one, so "minor" and "major" are Riot's words, not our numbers. We do not know which Windows calls Valorant made before or after the change beyond Riot's statement that the APIs changed. And this is not a guide to other games' input options: the Overwatch comparison shows how two settings with similar names can do unrelated things, so check each game's own notes.