AMD’s original Anti-Lag technology was infamous for causing problems in the video games it “supported,” and AMD’s second generation Anti-Lag 2 appears to be following in its predecessor’s footsteps. The developers behind the Spider-Man 2 PC port revealed in their latest patch notes for the game, that the Anti-Lag 2 SDK has been removed from the game temporarily for causing crashes on AMD Radeon GPUs.
Specifically, the Spider-Man 2 dev team discovered (in collaboration with AMD) that driver crashes on Radeon GPUs can be related to the initialization of the Anti-Lag 2 SDK in the game. Apparently, not everyone running an AMD GPU is crashing with Anti-Lag 2, but at least some of the player base is experiencing crashes with the latency-reducing tech.
The Spider-Man 2 devs say AMD is working on a driver update to fix the issue, so apparently Anti-Lag 2 will only be re-introduced to the game when that driver goes live.
The launch of AMD’s original Anti-Lag+ technology went anything but smoothly. Anti-Lag+ was AMD’s first attempt at a true Nvidia Reflex competitor, offering latency reductions at the CPU level. However, Anti-Lag+ launched with immediate problems in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty Warzone, Apex Legends and Counter-Strike 2, with the former two crashing due to their anti-cheat systems kicking in, believing Anti-Lag+ to be an illegal (cheating) application.
The worst offender was Counter-Strike 2, with its more aggressive anti-cheat system activating VAC bans when Anti-Lag+ was enabled. The issue turned out to be that AMD didn’t work with or alert developers about adding Anti-Lag+ support into their game. Anti-Lag+ operates at an engine level, requiring manipulation of game files to function, so it’s understandable why anti-cheat systems were being triggered in these titles.
Anti-Lag 2 apparently addressed this as there have been no issues regarding cheating triggers or account bans from Anti-Lag 2 integration. However, the crashing seen in Spider-Man 2 reveal that the technology is not immune to other problems, suggesting the SDK and/or AMD’s drivers need additional fine-tuning.
