Valve Warns Against Enabling AMD Anti-Lag+ for Risk of Ban Due to DLL Modification

Valve is advising Counter-Strike 2 players to avoid enabling the just-released AMD Anti-Lag+ feature in the game as it may potentially lead to a ban. The feature rolled out via the latest AMD GPU drivers adds Anti-Lag+ to the game but implements it via tampering with game DLL functions which may lead to Steam’s VAC detection flagging your system and leading to a ban.

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

The key points here is that this affects those using the latest drivers with AMD Anti-Lag+ enabled on Counter-Strike 2 which are mostly Radeon RX 7000 owners. Valve advises players to refrain from using the feature until AMD updates their implementation and only then will Valve start reversing VAC bans.

AMD Anti-Lag+ is the Radeon counterpart of NVIDIA’s Reflex technology aimed reducing in supported games. With NVIDIA Reflex being a day-one feature for Counter-Strike 2, AMD Anti-Lag+ is still catching up and its scary to see developments like this.

Update: AMD has now pulled the drivers for download from their website as of this writing (10/14/2023 3:36AM Manila Time):

https://drivers.amd.com/drivers/whql-amd-software-adrenalin-edition-23.10.1-win10-win11-oct11-rdna.exe

Copies of the drivers are still out in mirror sites.

Update: AMD has responded and echoes the same instruction of Valve to disable Anti-Lag+ on CS2. No further information has been provided on other games being affected by the issue.