PSA: Don't Enable AMD Anti-Lag+ In CS2 Or Valve Will Ban You For It
If you're an AMD user and you read our post about how NVIDIA's Reflex technology obliterates input lag in the competitive shooter, you might be thinking about flicking on the company's similar Anti-Lag+ feature to gain the same benefits. Well, DON'T. Because if you do, you will get banned from the game.
We know that because of this tweet from the official Counter-Strike account on Xwitter, which states unequivocally that if you enable Radeon Anti-Lag+ in CS2, you will get a VAC ban. This isn't just a case of vendor favoritism. Instead, the difference is that NVIDIA Reflex is integrated into the game while Anti-Lag+ works by intercepting game engine function calls and redirecting them.
That behavior is also the way a lot of game hacks work, so unsurprisingly, it kicks off Valve's anti-cheat for Counter-Strike 2. As commenter Konrad pointed out in our last post about CS2 cheaters, cheating is actually a major problem in CS2 right now, so we can't really fault Valve for being vigilant.
Curiously, the CS2 post promises that "once AMD ships an update," Valve will work on identifying affected users and unbanning them, but we're not exactly sure what such an update would be. Ideally, the update would really be for the game itself, so that CS2 players on Radeon hardware could enjoy the latency-reducing benefits of AMD's technology.
In any case, the messaging is clear: don't enable Radeon Anti-Lag+ in CS2 right now. Stay tuned to the Counter-Strike and AMD Xwitter accounts for further updates.
