AMD Rolls Back Anti-Lag+ In Its Latest Radeon Driver Due To Cheat Bans, What Now?

It's common for gamers to talk about input lag as stems from input devices and display devices, but the majority of the motion-to-photon lag for most PC gamers actually comes from the software stack itself. NVIDIA has its Reflex technology to counteract this latency, and AMD has its Anti-Lag, but Radeon Anti-Lag isn't quite as effective as Reflex owing to its driver-based nature (where Reflex requires game engine integration).


The Anti-Lag+ feature works by detouring game engine DLL functions to functions provided by the graphics driver instead. This, unsurprisingly, tends to tweak off games' anti-cheat software. We reported about this on Friday, when Valve acknowledged the issue and sent out a tweet warning AMD GPU users to stay away from the Anti-Lag+ feature while playing Counter-Strike 2, but as it turns out, the problem isn't limited to just CS2.


After a flood of reports from gamers unfairly banned for simply using a feature provided by their graphics card, AMD has elected to release a new driver, version 23.10.2, that explicitly disables Anti-Lag+ altogether. This is a bummer, as there are some offline games where the technology could be put to use, including Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Ghostwire Tokyo, Resident Evil 4, Forspoken, and others.

For its part, AMD says that it is "actively working with game developers on a solution to re-enable Anti-Lag+", and also that it is helping to "reinstate gamers who were impacted by the anti-cheat bans." The company recommends everyone with compatible hardware—that's all Radeon RX 5000 and newer GPUs—to move on up to the 23.10.2 driver just in case. This driver also has significant bug fixes and performance improvements for Counter-Strike 2, Starfield, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Lords of the Fallen, and Forza Motorsport, too.