TECH NEWS – The first version of AMD’s Radeon Anti-Lag was a driver-based solution that got some gamers banned at the time (all bans have since been lifted), but since the second iteration takes a different approach, there won’t be any problems this time around.
Anti-Lag+ is a latency (lag) reduction technology that went up against Nvidia’s Reflex. The bans from games happened because the technology modified the files that triggered anti-cheat systems. Nvidia solved the problem by working with developers to integrate Reflex into games. So AMD pulled Anti-Lag+ and asked everyone to wait for new news.
Now Radeon Anti-Lag 2 has been released, which is built on a completely new foundation. This has to be integrated into games one by one, so AMD is on a similar path as Nvidia, and for now it can only be tested in a preview form in Counter-Strike 2. It’s a compensation of sorts, since Anti-Lag+ was banned by some at the time. “With the in-game Radeon Anti-Lag 2, the frame alignment is also applied in the game code itself and works in conjunction with the CPU pacing controlled by the driver to allow for better frame sync. This results in even lower click-to-response latency than an in-driver-only solution like Radeon Anti-Lag. Because Radeon Anti-Lag 2 is an in-game technology, it requires game developers to add it to their games, with Counter-Strike 2 being the first,” AMD wrote.
The company has also demonstrated how much better Anti-Lag 2 is than Anti-Lag+ on Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards and Radeon 700M integrated GPUs, reducing lag by an average of 37% compared to when AMD’s technology is not enabled, and it works on multiple products to boot. If you have at least an RX 5000 graphics card or a Ryzen 6000 processor (there are a few exceptions: Ryzen 7000 CPUs using the GCN architecture graphics chip), it should work.
AMD will be releasing the Anti-Lag 2 development kit to developers on GPUOpen. You can get the technology with the Adrenalin 24.5.1 driver, and if you see Counter-Strike 2 updated on Steam, it’s there in the settings. Finally, a race to reduce lag!
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