AMD's Anti-Lag+ Triggers Anti-Cheat Protection in Multiple Games

(Image credit: AMD)

AMD's Anti-Lag+ feature was designed to make games more responsive and improve user experience. However, its implementation triggers anti-cheat protection technologies in multiple online games, rendering the part unusable.

As it turns out, the enablement of Anti-Lag+ capability triggers anti-cheat protection in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 , Call of Duty Warzone , and Apex Legends or crashes these games. On Friday, it turned out that Anti-Lag+ triggered anti-cheat protection in Counter-Strike 2 , resulting in VAC's ban. As a result, AMD had to withdraw its latest Adrenalin driver.

AMD's Anti-Lag+ and Nvidia's Reflex technologies are designed to reduce input lag by optimizing how games are controlled and render graphics. There is a difference between how they are implemented, though.

Nvidia's Reflex is a separate library that game developers add to their titles, and this library interacts with the game engine. By contrast, AMD's Anti-Lag+ technology, currently supported by AMD's Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards (which are among the best graphics cards ), requires a feature in the company's drivers and modification of the game engine, which is something that triggers anti-cheat protection.

It is unclear whether AMD can implement its Anti-Lag+ differently without dealing with game engines or if game developers certify such modifications and make appropriate changes to their anti-cheat protection technologies. In the meantime, gamers should not use AMD's Anti-Lag+ in competitive online games to avoid bans.

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Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.