Vanguard On-Demand Mode: The Big Shift
Vanguard on-demand mode is a new optional setting for Riot’s kernel-level anti-cheat that lets its driver start only when a Riot game launches and shut down when the session ends, instead of loading at Windows boot and running permanently in the background with an always-on system tray presence.
Riot has begun rolling out this on-demand mode for Vanguard, the anti-cheat used in Valorant and League of Legends, so the driver can launch when you open a Riot title instead of loading at system start. The change went live on 24 June 2026 and, on paper, answers the single biggest complaint players have had since Vanguard arrived with Valorant in 2020: that it insisted on being always-on, watching your PC from the moment Windows booted. In other words, Riot anti-cheat is now optional in how it runs, not in whether it exists—your choice is between the old always-on model and the new Vanguard on-demand mode, not between anti-cheat and no anti-cheat at all.
If you do nothing, nothing changes: Vanguard will keep loading at boot and sitting in your tray exactly as it does now. The option is there for players who care enough about startup behavior and system cleanliness to meet Riot’s conditions and flip the switch.
The Catch: Vanguard Pre-Check And Windows Security Requirements
The freedom to run Riot anti-cheat only when you play is gated behind Vanguard Pre-Check, a bundle of modern Windows security requirements that Riot treats as the entry ticket to the on-demand model. To qualify, your PC must be on Windows 11 25H2 or later, with Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, virtualization-based security, and other firmware-level protections enabled. These are not arbitrary hoops: they underpin a new Runtime Driver Attestation Report in Windows that records every driver loaded since boot in a TPM-backed log, which anti-cheat can query even if it was not present at startup.
That log solves what Riot calls the “who loads first” problem, where a vulnerable driver could sneak a cheat into the kernel before Vanguard started, then unload to hide. Before this Windows feature, Vanguard had to run from boot to keep a continuous trust chain. Now, as long as your system can produce an unbroken attestation report, the anti-cheat can arrive later, trust the kernel state, and still detect sketchy drivers. The hitch is that most of these settings live in your BIOS and Vanguard cannot toggle them for you, so you may be staring at motherboard manuals if you want on-demand.
Here is the blunt reality: Riot is trading one form of intrusion (always-on anti-cheat) for another (deep OS and firmware hardening). If you want Vanguard on-demand mode, you have to embrace the Windows security stack Riot has hitched it to.
Who Qualifies Today And How You Turn Vanguard On-Demand On
Riot says around a third of its players are already ready for Vanguard on-demand mode out of the box. One source puts this at about 34 percent, with another citing 35 percent of players who already satisfy the Pre-Check requirements and will see a button to switch into on-demand mode after updating their client. Most modern machines ship with Windows 11, Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, and related protections enabled, so this group will not need to touch their BIOS at all.
For the remaining roughly 65 percent, enabling Riot anti-cheat optional behavior means work. Riot estimates most players in this bucket can meet Pre-Check by adjusting BIOS settings to turn on the needed security features, while about 3 percent of weekly players are on devices that lack key hardware like TPM 2.0 or IOMMU entirely and would need a hardware upgrade to qualify. The company stresses that none of this is mandatory: if you opt out of Pre-Check, Vanguard stays always-on and your games continue to run.
Philosophically, Riot is drawing a line between “secured” and “legacy” setups and allowing both into ranked queues—for now. You choose your side every time you either click that on-demand button or leave your configuration as-is.
Security vs. Player Trust: Why Riot Is Making This Trade
This change is not Riot going soft on cheating; it is Riot admitting that always-on anti-cheat has a political cost with players. The driver’s constant presence at boot has been the central complaint since its launch with Valorant and its later expansion to League. Moving to Vanguard on-demand mode is a concession to those concerns, but one that tries to keep Riot’s security posture intact through attestation and hardware trust rather than omnipresence.
Cheaters still appear in about 0.7 percent of all PC ranked matches across Valorant and League of Legends, with kernel-level cheats remaining the most common route because alternatives like DMA hardware or computer-vision pixelbots are more involved to deploy. Riot’s anti-cheat lead says the focus is on how cheats get code into the kernel, not whack-a-mole detection of every tool, and the Pre-Check plus attestation framework is a direct expression of that strategy. In effect, Riot is saying: give us a tamper-evident OS and we will stop insisting on boot-time surveillance.
From a trust standpoint, that is the right direction. Players get a clearer, opt-in path to stricter system security and a less intrusive anti-cheat runtime, even if it demands more from their hardware and their patience with BIOS menus.
What Comes Next For Vanguard And Competitive Play
Vanguard on-demand mode is only the first step in what Riot calls “proactive, voluntary trust segmentation” for real players on genuine hardware. The company has signalled that it may add more checks to Vanguard Pre-Check over time while keeping the system optional for most players, reserving stricter requirements for the most competitive segments, unusual devices, or the very highest ranks. That is the polite way of saying that if you want to play at the sharpest end of the ladder, your PC will likely have to live in the fully secured bucket.
For now, the metric to watch is how many players move into that bucket: Riot cites a fully secured share of roughly 34–35 percent today and notes it is growing by about 1 to 2 percent each month. As on-demand adoption expands, Riot has already named computer-vision pixelbots as a future focus, once the kernel path is more tightly controlled across the player base. The message is clear. Vanguard on-demand mode is not an end state; it is the platform Riot will build its next generation of anti-cheat on.
If you care about both fair matches and how much control anti-cheat has over your machine, this is the moment to make a choice: either stay on the legacy path and accept always-on Vanguard, or invest the time—and possibly hardware—to join the on-demand, attestation-backed future Riot is pushing toward.
