AMD has released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 23.10.1 driver for its graphics cards (we’ll have a separate story for it later today). Among other things, this driver enables Anti-Lag+ on the RX 7000 series GPUs for Counter-Strike 2. However, Valve has publically stated that the usage of Anti-Lag+ will get you banned in CS2.
AMD's latest driver has made their "Anti-Lag/+" feature available for CS2, which is implemented by detouring engine dll functions.
If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban.
Once AMD ships an update we…
— CS2 (@CounterStrike) October 13, 2023
Valve claims that Anti-Lag+ is implemented by detouring engine dll functions. So, since the current implementation of Anti-Lag+ tampers with CS2 code, you’ll receive a VAC ban.
Valve recommends disabling Anti-Lag+, at least for now. Then, once the red team ships an update to it, the developers will work on identifying the affected users and reverse their ban.
For what it’s worth, Counter-Strike 2 currently supports NVIDIA Reflex. Contrary to AMD’s Anti-Lag+, NVIDIA Reflex does not tamper with the game’s source code, so you can safely use it.
Counter-Strike 2 is free to play on Steam right now, featuring overhauled graphics and maps. Valve has rebuilt from the ground up numerous maps, leveraging all of the new Source 2 tools and rendering features. Furthermore, the team has upgraded other maps that use new Source 2 lighting, including a physically based rendering system that produces realistic materials, lighting, and reflections.
Stay tuned for more!
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I’m not sure why AMD didn’t catch this before release of the driver. Maybe when the article gets released later today it will be more clear. Anyway, at least the bans can be overturned later possibly.
Knowing Valve, I doubt they’ll get all wrongful VAC bans reversed.
“why you dont own any mp game ever”
If nothing else we agree on this one thing
AMD should have known better, you’d think a GPU manufacturer would understand how anti-cheats work. If they were to let this through then they would open up the door to every other hack that manipulates the core game files.
This is EXACTLY why Nvidia helps developers add Reflex directly to the game code using simple Open Source tools …. Then it’s completely transparent to the anti-cheat.
How is it tampering with source code? It’s probably just reading out those dynamic libraries, but it is very unlikely that it is tampering with actual game code, which would require a complete recompile of the game.
I have no card with this tech, and haven’t looked up what it does, but it seems highly unlikely it tampers with actual game code.
They didn’t say with the source code. It’s tampering with the running code by detouring engine dll functions. That’s also how cheats work.
There’s no such thing like “running code”. There’s just code, games go through render passes.
But code and data are different things.
Cheats don’t generally tamper with code, they read out the RAM heap. They read data and inject data, either brute force or with DLL injection. An aimbot for example will read out the memory, or do network sniffing, it doesn’t change any code.
To change actual code, you need access to the uncompiled code, which players don’t have, even AMD doesn’t have this.
The only code you can see is machine code, which is mumbo jumbo for large projects. You can try to find some ASCII characters left in the code, with a hex editor, but you’re usually not going to find much.
Code (even compiled code) has to be executed as a series of instructions on the CPU. It’s possible to alter these instructions, or to replace them entirely by replacing the compiled code with new injected code.
What’s probably happening is AMD’s driver hooks the graphics API the game is using, injects some of their own code into the game, and then alters certain functionality of the graphics API and how the game utilizes it in order to reduce latency.
People who make cheats are pretty well versed in reverse engineering. It’s certainly difficult, but you can definitely hook onto function calls in a compiled, running program.
As a person who spends a lot of time debugging code, and writing “fixes” in debuggers attached to running processes… you, my friend, are categorically wrong. You 100% do not need access to the uncompiled code to change how code runs. You only need to redirect an instruction pointer to another location in memory to run your own code, or you can literally just alter the assembly code on the fly.
Good lord, operating systems do not just allows you to do this. A program’s scope is protected, bound checks are performed, etc. You can not “just alter code of the fly”.
The exception are buffer overflow attacks, which are very difficult to trigger.
It’s more accurate to say that it’s attempting to bypass the anti-tampering software, but the method is identical to how aim-bots are made now, so the distinction doesn’t matter.