Counter Strike 2 & AMD Anti-Lag+ issues
Last week, Valve officially acknowledged that AMD’s Anti-Lag+ technology was making unwanted alterations to game files, categorizing it as a form of cheating. Consequently, Valve’s Anti-Cheat system started issuing bans to some gamers who had been employing this technology with their Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs. This specific group of gamers experienced the impact because AMD had not yet enabled the technology for other GPU series. Interestingly, the technology, despite being officially introduced, was effectively unlaunched just a month after its initial unveiling.
Now, the game is introducing a validation process to examine GPU drivers. This measure is intended to ensure that the Adrenalin 23.10.1 driver, which incorporated Anti-Lag+ for CS2, is not in use. Furthermore, the newer driver version (23.10.2) has effectively disabled this technology for all supported games.
10/19/23 Game Update, Source: CS
It’s clear that AMD needs to reevaluate their approach when introducing significant graphics technology. Attempting graphics pipeline optimizations to reduce latency at the driver level may not be the wisest approach, especially when dealing with online games that employ robust anti-cheat systems.
As of now, neither AMD nor the Counter-Strike development team have confirmed when or if Anti-Lag+ will make a comeback in the game. To address this, AMD may find it necessary to follow NVIDIA’s Reflex approach by collaborating directly with game developers to integrate Anti-Lag+ into specific titles. Simultaneously, the existing method can continue to be utilized for most offline games.
Source: Counter Strike
