Valve urges AMD users to disable the Anti-Lag+ feature, due to causing VAC bans.

[Error 52]

Summary

AMD's new Anti-Lag+ feature appears to have not gone without a few hiccups, as Valve has released a statement on Twitter saying that, due to it detouring engine DLL functions, it can trip up Valve's VAC anti-cheat and cause bans. They will work on reverting the bans after AMD ships a new update.

 

Quotes

Quote

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 can do the work of identifying affected users and reversing their ban.

 

My thoughts

Astonishing fuck-up from AMD here, frankly. It seems utterly baffling that they didn't consider this a direct possibility from tampering with games that have anti-cheat and didn't even consult Valve about it. And if it's tripping up VAC, god help them with any games that have Ring-0 anti-cheat.

 

Sources

https://wccftech.com/counter-strike-2-devs-advise-against-enabling-amd-anti-lag-radeon-drivers-can-get-you-banned/

https://twitter.com/CounterStrike/status/1712875606776729832

 

[GreatnessRD]

That's a big yikes. I just hope they identify the real affected users and not some meatball who really is cheating and turned on AL+ to say "Hey look at me, I turned it on too" and gets unbanned.

 

With that out of the way, I just laugh. Gaming didn't used to be so hard back in my day. The 2010s and up have been absolute garbage, lmao.

[Error 52]

1 minute ago, GreatnessRD said:

With that out of the way, I just laugh. Gaming didn't used to be so hard back in my day. The 2010s and up have been absolute garbage, lmao.

 

I dunno, I remember old 2000's anti-cheats being giant piles of shit that would kick you for looking at them funny.

[191x7]

1 minute ago, Error 52 said:

 

I dunno, I remember old 2000's anti-cheats being giant piles of shit that would kick you for looking at them funny.

Those were the good days. PunkBuster, GGC Stream, and all the other methods that actually worked...

[jagdtigger]

3 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

PunkBuster

Dont even remind me, that thing was a PITA. Wouldt surprise me if i still have the tool to install/repair that abomination somewhere deep in the downloads share of my NAS......

[WereCat]

LOL, I literally disabled Anti-Lag just to get some new TimeSpy OC records before hopping into CS2 session and I forgot to turn it on again, lucky me  Thanks for the heads up!

[porina]

I'd be interested in more in depth technical reasons why this is happening. It may lead in future to games providing some kind of new interface to the driver to enable this type of functionality without triggering anti-cheat. 

[Levent]

25 minutes ago, Error 52 said:

Astonishing fuck-up from AMD here

FirstTime?.jpg

 

Lack of QA and lack of software stability is AMDs forte.

 

[RejZoR]

23 minutes ago, GreatnessRD said:

That's a big yikes. I just hope they identify the real affected users and not some meatball who really is cheating and turned on AL+ to say "Hey look at me, I turned it on too" and gets unbanned.

 

With that out of the way, I just laugh. Gaming didn't used to be so hard back in my day. The 2010s and up have been absolute garbage, lmao.

Even if those get unbanned, the fact they cheated once, it means they'll cheat again and next time they won't have this excuse at hand anymore.

EDIT:

How is this AMD's fuckup? It's just Valve's VAC picking up this feature as some sort of interference and resulting in bans. There has probably been many such cases, but no one ever knew them because companies like Valve and AMD solved them internally without anyone ever knowing.

[pas008]

36 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

Those were the good days. PunkBuster, GGC Stream, and all the other methods that actually worked...

actually having private dedicated servers were more fun as long as admins were in game or reviewed them

miss those days more

edit even vote kick was fun lol

[Error 52]

22 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

How is this AMD's fuckup? It's just Valve's VAC picking up this feature as some sort of interference and resulting in bans. There has probably been many such cases, but no one ever knew them because companies like Valve and AMD solved them internally without anyone ever knowing.

AMD should've been well-aware that modifying game DLLs would run the risk of this happening. It's software that literally interacts with the game in the exact same way that even basic cheats do.

[Lexcyn]

40 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Even if those get unbanned, the fact they cheated once, it means they'll cheat again and next time they won't have this excuse at hand anymore.

EDIT:

How is this AMD's fuckup? It's just Valve's VAC picking up this feature as some sort of interference and resulting in bans. There has probably been many such cases, but no one ever knew them because companies like Valve and AMD solved them internally without anyone ever knowing.

I agree, this isn't on AMD - this is Valve's issue. AMD can't be expected to work with every single developer for a driver level change. If a game considers this cheating, why are they not reaching out to AMD and telling them to disable it for their game FIRST before banning people for something they have no idea is even a "cheat".

[Fasterthannothing]

Welcome to AMD where QA testing is done by the users and we call it open sourcing our development 

[StDragon]

7 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Welcome to AMD where QA testing is done by the users and we call it open sourcing our development 

It's not AMD's fault. These "anti-cheat" modules are hacks, and in some cases rootkits.

I'm not a dev, but why hasn't an anti-cheat system been built into the latest DirectX API? I think it's long overdue. At least have a separate API that's an industry standard for this function if at all possible.

[porina]

16 minutes ago, Lexcyn said:

I agree, this isn't on AMD - this is Valve's issue. AMD can't be expected to work with every single developer for a driver level change. If a game considers this cheating, why are they not reaching out to AMD and telling them to disable it for their game FIRST before banning people for something they have no idea is even a "cheat".

This isn't black and white, but I'd put more fault on AMD than Valve on this specific matter. Valve goes, you want to play this game, you don't tamper with it. AMD accessed game code in a way that could tamper with it, regardless if it does or doesn't malicously. To avoid this, either implement it in a way that doesn't violate game integrity, or work with gamedevs to put in an interface to do what they want without negatively impacting the game.

 

12 minutes ago, StDragon said:

It's not AMD's fault. These "anti-cheat" modules are hacks, and in some cases rootkits.

I'm not a dev, but why hasn't an anti-cheat system been built into the latest DirectX API? I think it's long overdue. At least have a separate API that's an industry standard for this function if at all possible.

Anti-cheats tend to want lower level access, because if the cheat runs at lower level access than anti-cheat, it would have a significant advantage.

 

A "Windows" anti-cheat implementation would probably have to go lower OS level, not a high level like DX. Maybe it could be some extension to existing integrity protections that home users don't care much about, but enterprise users may do.

[Error 52]

1 hour ago, Lexcyn said:

I agree, this isn't on AMD - this is Valve's issue. AMD can't be expected to work with every single developer for a driver level change. If a game considers this cheating, why are they not reaching out to AMD and telling them to disable it for their game FIRST before banning people for something they have no idea is even a "cheat".

Rule one of not getting banned is "don't fuck with the DLLs". AMD was doing game-specific hacks to Counter-Strike, seemingly without discussing it with Valve, and seemingly triggering VAC automatically. I don't see how that's not on AMD.

 

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

It's not AMD's fault. These "anti-cheat" modules are hacks, and in some cases rootkits.

I'm not a dev, but why hasn't an anti-cheat system been built into the latest DirectX API? I think it's long overdue. At least have a separate API that's an industry standard for this function if at all possible.

1. VAC isn't a rootkit.

2. If Microsoft baked Anti-Cheat right into Windows people would lose their shit.

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, Error 52 said:

AMD should've been well-aware that modifying game DLLs would run the risk of this happening. It's software that literally interacts with the game in the exact same way that even basic cheats do.

It's on game companies to whitelist features from companies as big as AMD or NVIDIA. Imagine getting banned because you're using NVIDIA Experience features and game bans you for it. Some even go as far as whitelisting less popular stuff like ReShade, for as long as you're not accessing depth buffers which can be used for wallhacking. I just don't have any idea how easy or hard that is to detect with anti-cheat.

[Error 52]

39 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

It's on game companies to whitelist features from companies as big as AMD or NVIDIA. Imagine getting banned because you're using NVIDIA Experience features and game bans you for it. Some even go as far as whitelisting less popular stuff like ReShade, for as long as you're not accessing depth buffers which can be used for wallhacking. I just don't have any idea how easy or hard that is to detect with anti-cheat.

Well, it's not just Counter-Strike. And I don't understand how companies could possibly whitelist a feature that directly tampers with the game files and, quite clearly, they had not been given any kind of heads-up or warning about.

[MarkPol88]

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

How is this AMD's fuckup?

Any tamper with game's DLL's is a big "no no" for anticheats for well over a decade - that's how.

 

4 hours ago, Lexcyn said:

AMD can't be expected to work with every single developer for a driver level change.

Well, "not working" with "such small" company as Valve led them to pulling back driver and another set of "AMD drivers bad" headlines.

In other words - I would bloody well expect them to get their sh*t together because nVidia's Reflex works as intended.

4 hours ago, Lexcyn said:

If a game considers this cheating, why are they not reaching out to AMD and telling them to disable it for their game FIRST before banning people for something they have no idea is even a "cheat".

And do what in the meantime? Shutdown whole of anticheat system for days/weeks? Or maybe turn off servers?

 

 

Why is it so hard for so many people to admit that AMD is not perfect?

And I am writing this from all-AMD PC right now.

 

[Mark Kaine]

5 hours ago, Error 52 said:

AMD should've been well-aware that modifying game DLLs would run the risk of this happening. It's software that literally interacts with the game in the exact same way that even basic cheats do.

i find it kinda funny that a bit of dll tinkering triggers an "anti cheat", but then again i would never play a valve game, play stupid games win stupid prizes, i guess... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

 

 

Spoiler

ps: been playing tons of games where changing a dll *does not* trigger the anti cheat , like wth there are actually legit reasons to do this, outside of "cheating"

 

[Fasterthannothing]

4 hours ago, StDragon said:

It's not AMD's fault. These "anti-cheat" modules are hacks, and in some cases rootkits.

I'm not a dev, but why hasn't an anti-cheat system been built into the latest DirectX API? I think it's long overdue. At least have a separate API that's an industry standard for this function if at all possible.

They have a responsibility to test compatibility especially when it comes to anti cheat software. I don't see Nvidia software tripping the anti cheat software 

[Mark Kaine]

35 minutes ago, MarkPol88 said:

And do what in the meantime? Shutdown whole of anticheat system for days/weeks? 

Aren't Valve games full of cheaters anyway? Id say DO IT, LES GO

[Mark Kaine]

36 minutes ago, MarkPol88 said:

Any tamper with game's DLL's is a big "no

its a very stupid system though because you just need to "fix" the CRC thingie and the "anti cheat" will never know  

[StDragon]

6 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

They have a responsibility to test compatibility especially when it comes to anti cheat software. I don't see Nvidia software tripping the anti cheat software 

Maybe they have, and only a certain subset of public users got banned. Is that number so low that it didn't ensnare any of the testers during the QA/QC process?

I'm not defending AMD here if they've been messing around in the DLL memory space in kludgy way. But then again, anti-cheat is a bit of a landmine to step on when it's not well documented (by design).

This is why standards exist, and exactly what happens when one or more party members hack together solutions in a nonconformal way.

[Mark Kaine]

6 hours ago, Error 52 said:

 

I dunno, I remember old 2000's anti-cheats being giant piles of shit that would kick you for looking at them funny.

you did something wrong..... always get the newest crack from a friend nearby and this was never an issue......

 

 

35 minutes ago, StDragon said:

This is why standards exist, and exactly what happens when one or more party members hack together solutions in a nonconformal way.

Exactly and it's time Valve adheres to them, their "VAC" is known to be outdated since its inception and easily overcome,  the fact that simple dll shenanigans can trigger it is astonishing. 

 

 

that said i agree with your other points, this could really just affect a small portion of users and amd probably should have tested this better in the first place.