I still don't get how people play Valorant with the kernel-level anti-cheat

The sad reality is that people simply do not give a damn/are so weak willed that they will buy the game regardless. I wish it weren't the case, but unfortunately it is.

I'd rather play without cheaters than care about running a kernel-level anticheat.

I personally don't mind having it installed, just because it makes a huge difference.

I remember playing CS:GO (and later, CS2) and it was super common to see cheaters in almost every other match.

In contrast, I haven't seen a single cheater yet in a match of Valorant.

You can see the difference yourself by checking the UnknownCheats forums for CS2 vs Valorant: the CS2 subforum is full of new hacks every day (most of which seem to be slight modifications of existing ones) while the Valorant one is completely dead.

That's odd, because in my experience almost all games run best in "Borderless windowed" mode.

You get full-screen performance with the ability to easily alt-tab without mode changes.

>That's odd, because in my experience almost all games run best in "Borderless windowed" mode.

I think the difference is between when you tell the game to run that way in it's settings, versus abruptly forcing it by doing alt-tab. Games where their default 'full screen' is really 'borderless windowed' don't have problems when you alt-tab, but a lot of them act weird when their 'full screen' actually is a true full screen mode and you force them out of it by alt-tabbing.

I think it's only been with new DX12 presentation modes [1] that games can use "Borderless windowed" without input lag. Before that or without updated support, you would always get a noticeable amount of input lag when not using exclusive fullscreen. I played CSGO competitively for a while, and it was definitely enough to be annoying.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3ddxgi...

This isn't my area of expertise, but isn't DX12 a decade old at this point?

Not needing to care about win7/8 is relatively recent (a few years now, but a lot less than ten), and fully supporting both dx11 and dx12 with no caveats was sufficiently difficult that most games didn't really take full advantage of dx12 until they could drop dx11.

Flip model swap chains were already available since DXGI 1.2 (Windows 8) and could be used with D3D11.

Strangely enough, Windows 7 also supported the flip model, but only as an extension to D3D9, not 10/11.

Flip model swap chains were already available for D3D11 since DXGI 1.2 (Windows 8) and also as an extension to D3D9 (but not 10/11) since Win 7.