The changes introduced with the Kendo UI R3 2016 release enable you to determine if the valueMapper must resolve a value to an index or a value to a dataItem. This is configured through the mapValueTo option that accepts two possible values - "index" or "dataItem". By default, the mapValueTo is set to "index", which does not affect the current behavior of the virtualization process.

For more information, refer to the article on virtualization.