Enabling AMD Anti-Lag+ May Get You Into Trouble With Game Anti-Cheats
Enabling AMD Anti-Lag+ May Get You Into Trouble With Game Anti-Cheats
Recently, AMD’s Anti-Lag+ feature was found to be causing players getting Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) bans, as confirmed by developers of Counter-Strike 2. The reason for the detection was due to the way Anti-Lag+ works: Valve says this is “implemented by detouring engine dll functions”, which in conventional English meant the feature is functioning in a manner similar to cheating tools (through code injection).
AMD’s latest driver has made their “Anti-Lag/+” feature available for CS2, which is implemented by detouring engine dll functions.
If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban.
Once AMD ships an update we…
— CS2 (@CounterStrike) October 13, 2023
AMD has since provided a statement, clarifying that they are aware of the issue and is currently working with Valve to fix the issue (while advising all players to disable Anti-Lag+ until further notice). The AMD Anti-Lag+ is a feature currently exclusive to Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs, and some games – including Counter-Strike 2 – is among the supported games list.
https://t.co/LOiOIcoZsV pic.twitter.com/LvAyIOj8Ec
— AMD Radeon (@amdradeon) October 14, 2023
It turns out that this is not the first time Anti-Lag+ has caused trouble in games, and Videocardz has compiled a list where players has faced account bans and game crashes involving the feature. AMD employees has responded to these incidents and are conducting investigations prior to Valve’s statement on VAC bans, though the issue raised by Valve in particular has confirmed its severity.
In case you wonder why does NVIDIA’s Reflex technology managed to do this without triggering anti-cheats, that’s down to the way it works which does not involve modification in DLL files. Reflex requires explicit support from developers to implement (and it takes longer time), which meant that it runs on a separate pipeline without touching the game code in ways that Radeon Anti-Lag+ does.
Pokdepinion: That’s unfortunate – guess AMD needs to get creative to get around the code injection problem. Perhaps whitelisting? Though that’s a potential hole for cheaters to slip in as well, if they’re skilled enough.
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