With Counter-Strike 2, an old shooter has launched in new clothing. Now Valve warns against using a certain feature and threatens with a VAC ban.
Valve is currently explicitly warning: If you activate a certain function, you will be punished with a hard VAC ban. And that means you won’t be able to play any games on Steam that rely on VAC protection, and there are numerous popular multiplayer titles.
At least there is some good news. Because under certain circumstances, the ban will be lifted.
Currently, this only affects owners of an AMD graphics card. Owners of an Nvidia graphics card with a similar feature are not supposed to be affected.
Update, October 16, 2023: There are now reports that other games are also said to be affected by a ban. You can find more information in the linked article.
Use of Anti-Lag+ leads to VAC ban
Valve itself writes:
AMD’s latest driver has made the “Anti-Lag/+” feature available for CS2, implemented by redirecting functions of the engine-dll. If you are an AMD customer and playing CS2, DO NOT activate ANTI-LAG/+; any manipulation of the CS code will lead to a VAC ban. As soon as AMD releases an update.
What is it all about? AMD’s Anti-Lag and Nvidia’s Reflex aim to reduce latency in games. Latency is simply the time it takes for your mouse click to display on the screen. Peripherals, built hardware, and even your monitor affect latency time.
What is now the problem? Anti-Lag initially only adjusts the CPU frequency of the GPU speed to avoid too many graphic processes from getting stuck in the queue.
However, Anti-Lag+ goes a step further, as adjustments are applied to the game code itself according to AMD. And this is exactly what bothers Valve. Because changes to the game code are not allowed and will be punished. Cheat programs do that too.
Who is affected by this? Currently, you can only use Anti-Lag+ with Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. If you are playing with a new AMD graphics card, you should either uninstall the latest update or disable Anti-Lag+ in the settings.
- AMD presents RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT – With a few nasty jabs against Nvidia
- AMD’s RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT in the test overview: Which graphics card is most worthwhile for me?
Currently, there is no indication that using Nvidia Reflex carries the risk of a ban.
What happens if I have been banned? If you have already been banned due to Anti-Lag+, Valve will lift the bans as soon as the driver issue is resolved. This is quite unusual, as VAC bans are normally not lifted.
A player has now been banned from Counter-Strike and Steam for other reasons. But Valve was gracious and lifted the ban:
