AMD’s Radeon Anti-Lag+ is getting gamers banned in Counter-Strike 2 and more

Like its predecessor, competitive team-based shooter Counter-Strike 2 is proving massively popular. Despite grumblings from CSGO veterans, it’s number one with a bullet for concurrent Steam players, averaging over 1.2 million players every day. If you’re among them and you’re using an AMD-powered machine, be careful: The new Anti-Lag+ feature for Radeon discrete and integrated graphics is getting some Counter-Strike players banned.

So sayeth the official Counter-Strike X (nee Twitter) account. “If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+,” the developers warn in no uncertain terms. According to Valve, the feature is routing around the game engine’s DLL files, which is tantamount to cheating as detected by Valve’s Anti-Cheat (VAC) software system. It seems like some users have already been banned for using the built-in feature.

This is, to put it kindly, not good. AMD users implementing the Anti-Lag+ features really have no way of knowing that its core functionality conflicts with Valve’s cheat detection scheme. Valve seems to lay the blame squarely on AMD, promising to un-ban affected users “once AMD ships an update.”

AMD has responded with a Twitter post of its own. “AMD is engaged with Valve to address the issue and will provide more details as they become available,” it says, further urging gamers using Adrenalin 23.10.1 not to enable Anti-Lag for CS2 until further notice. The Verge reports on various social media feedback indicating that the Anti-Lag feature is resulting in bans in some other games, including Apex Legends and Call of Duty: Warzone 2.

Knowing the general disposition of team-based shooter players, I’d hate to be on either company’s support team this week.