Frank Azor on X (formally Twitter) announced that AMD's Anti-Lag+ will be coming back shortly after being deleted from AMD drivers in the wake of its disastrous Counter-Strike 2 integration. Azor's post confirms that AMD has not forgotten about Anti-Lag+ and is working on improving it for a second launch.
Anti-Lag+ debuted in Sept. 2023 in conjunction with performance-enhancing Hyper-RX technology for Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs. Anti-Lag+ is a more potent version of AMD's Anti-Lag technology that reduces latency through the CPU in-engine. The only downside is that Anti-Lag+ needs to be implemented on a game-by-game basis, just like Nvidia's Reflex technology.
Unfortunately, AMD also had some serious issues integrating Anti-Lag+ into modern games — particularly, games with anti-cheat programs. Unlike Nvidia Reflex, which is implemented by the game developers, AMD tried to implement Anti-Lag+ all by itself, by injecting Anti-Lag+ into each game's game files without the developers knowing.
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This process inevitably triggered the anti-cheat systems in these Anti-Lag+ "supported games". The worst instance was during AMD's Anti-Lag+ integration with Counter-Strike 2, in which Valve's Anti-Cheat system started banning users using Anti-Lag+ in-game. This forced AMD to withdraw Anti-Lag+ completely, and delete it from its Adrenalin GPU drivers.
Azor did not say how Anti-Lag+'s second return would differ from the first. However, we can assume that AMD wants to avoid repeating its previous mistakes, and so AMD is probably going to go the route Nvidia took with Reflex and partner up with game developers directly.
Anti-Lag+ will be a very important feature for AMD to get right in the future. AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation, specifically, will benefit tremendously from AMD's latency-killing technology. Anti-Lag+ will help reduce the amount of input lag frame generation generates on its own (more than what Anti-Lag does already).
