Other games coming soon, pending developer support.
Official screenshot of Counter-Strike 2, the first game to support Anti-Lag 2 after defunct, driver-level Anti-Lag+ got players banned.(Image credit: Valve)
AMD's previous attempt at a successor to the driver-level Radeon Anti-Lag — Anti-Lag+ — launched in such a poor state that many games saw it as an attempted cheat, since it was injecting code into active applications to achieve its results. AMD promised that Anti-Lag+ would return, and now it appears to have done so in the form of Radeon Anti-Lag 2. Anti-Lag 2 is a true Nvidia Reflex competitor in every way that matters — including requiring direct support from the developers to be implemented. Games that don't support Anti-Lag 2 will be restricted to the regular old Anti-Lag solution.
AMD released benchmarking results in Counter-Strike 2 running at Very High settings, with input latency compared between No Anti-Lag, Anti-Lag, and Anti-Lag 2. Anti-Lag 2 in Counter-Strike 2 is achieving input lag as low as 11 ms, which seems on par with the sub-15 ms ranges that Nvidia so proudly touts on its page for Reflex in Counter-Strike 2.
AMD benchmarking Anti-Lag solutions in Counter-Strike 2 at Very High settings. (Image credit: AMD)
There may still be room for improvement, but this is considerably better than AMD's previous attempt, thanks to having proper game support. Since more and more games are supporting technologies like FSR and DLSS simultaneously, and Counter-Strike 2 is now the first game to support both Nvidia Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2, it seems likely that other games will follow suit. We hope, anyway.
Fortunately for users of AMD GPUs and iGPUs, the support for Radeon Anti-Lag 2 extends all the way back to pretty much anything that uses RDNA architecture or newer. This means that RX 5000 series GPUs and newer from AMD are all covered, and that most Ryzen 6000 series CPUs and newer are covered — though not if their iGPU is still based on GCN (as is the case with some entry-level chips).
Those eager to try out Radeon Anti-Lag 2 right away need only to download and install the new driver. Since Counter-Strike 2 is free to play and received an update to automatically enable Anti-Lag 2 on supported cards yesterday, nothing is preventing you from experiencing these improvements for yourself.
Hopefully, Valve will add back community server support for Counter-Strike 2 sooner rather than later to enable the full breadth of what that game has to offer now that we have all the Anti-Lag/Reflex we need. Surf maps should be a joy with these technologies enabled, after all.
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Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
How soon before cheating software pretends to be Radeon Anti-Lag 2 or Nvidia Reflex to bypass anti-cheat detection?
That...isn't how either of those things work, my friend.
Edit: To clarify, to my knowledge most cheating software wouldn't bother trying to spoof anything. Kernel-level anticheat exists because kernel-level cheats exist, and those don't typically work by impersonating a friendly protocol or what-have-you.
That...isn't how either of those things work, my friend.
Edit: To clarify, to my knowledge most cheating software wouldn't bother trying to spoof anything. Kernel-level anticheat exists because kernel-level cheats exist, and those don't typically work by impersonating a friendly protocol or what-have-you.
I do not know how they work only the first version was flagged as cheat software, was more just wondering if it was possible to do it.
Given that cheat and anti-cheat is a battle could it be possible work around anti-cheating software?
I do not know how they work only the first version was flagged as cheat software, was more just wondering if it was possible to do it.
Given that cheat and anti-cheat is a battle could it be possible work around anti-cheating software?
So, of course cheats can work around anticheats. It is a game of cat and mouse.
But the reason that the old Anti-Lag+ flagged anticheat was because it functioned akin to most fairly basic cheats. It was blatantly hooking onto applications as they ran to apply Anti-Lag+, but the game and their anticheats couldn't reasonably identify it as anything besides cheating— that's why engine-level integration is needed for Reflex or Anti-Lag 2. The old Anti-Lag can be applied to any game without issue since it doesn't hook applications in the same way, but is overall a much weaker solution than Reflex.
