Valorant 9.x stopped (inofficially) supporting Asus Xonar sound cards

Edit: Official Riot confirmation the Asus Xonar audio driver is blocked due to a cheating exploit by user Baconspleet who received following statement by official support: "... the driver is indeed blocked by vanguard as it was reportedly being used as a way to cheat. In this case, I'm afraid the only option to have sound in the game is a hardware upgrade, though that is understandably, not ideal."

https://maxedtech.com/asus-xonar-unified-drivers/comment-page-230/#show-comments

As Valorant players with all kinds of Asus Xonar sound cards have noticed since the 9.x patch series, the support for these devices has been dropped and the game will no longer function acceptably. After roughly half a minute, the entire system, not just the game, loses its audio output. Reddit user /u/travishenrichs has contacted support and received following statement: "In order to protect the competitive integrity and security of our games, some pieces of hardware are not supported with VALORANT and will not function properly with the game. Having said that, this is something being looked into by our QA team, but I can't provide an ETA at this time."

Since this critical bug is known for half-year, is not fixed by 9.10, it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon as the doubtful support response suggests. I hope software developers avoid situations such as these to avoid forced obsolescence of hardware devices, as these devices do function correctly on Windows 10 and 11.