AMD introduces Radeon Anti-Lag 2 with full integration for Counter-Strike 2 — the Nvidia Reflex alternative shouldn't trigger cheating bans this time

Official screenshot of Counter-Strike 2, the first game to support Anti-Lag 2 after defunct, driver-level Anti-Lag+ got players banned.

AMD's previous attempt at a successor to the driver-level Radeon Anti-Lag — Anti-Lag+ — launched in such a poor state that many games saw it as an attempted cheat, since it was injecting code into active applications to achieve its results. AMD promised that Anti-Lag+ would return, and now it appears to have done so in the form of Radeon Anti-Lag 2. Anti-Lag 2 is a true Nvidia Reflex competitor in every way that matters — including requiring direct support from the developers to be implemented. Games that don't support Anti-Lag 2 will be restricted to the regular old Anti-Lag solution.

AMD released benchmarking results in Counter-Strike 2 running at Very High settings, with input latency compared between No Anti-Lag, Anti-Lag, and Anti-Lag 2. Anti-Lag 2 in Counter-Strike 2 is achieving input lag as low as 11 ms, which seems on par with the sub-15 ms ranges that Nvidia so proudly touts on its page for Reflex in Counter-Strike 2.

AMD benchmarking Anti-Lag solutions in Counter-Strike 2 at Very High settings. (Image credit: AMD)

There may still be room for improvement, but this is considerably better than AMD's previous attempt, thanks to having proper game support. Since more and more games are supporting technologies like FSR and DLSS simultaneously, and Counter-Strike 2 is now the first game to support both Nvidia Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2, it seems likely that other games will follow suit. We hope, anyway.

Fortunately for users of AMD GPUs and iGPUs, the support for Radeon Anti-Lag 2 extends all the way back to pretty much anything that uses RDNA architecture or newer. This means that RX 5000 series GPUs and newer from AMD are all covered, and that most Ryzen 6000 series CPUs and newer are covered — though not if their iGPU is still based on GCN (as is the case with some entry-level chips).

Those eager to try out Radeon Anti-Lag 2 right away need only to download and install the new driver. Since Counter-Strike 2 is free to play and received an update to automatically enable Anti-Lag 2 on supported cards yesterday, nothing is preventing you from experiencing these improvements for yourself.

Hopefully, Valve will add back community server support for Counter-Strike 2 sooner rather than later to enable the full breadth of what that game has to offer now that we have all the Anti-Lag/Reflex we need. Surf maps should be a joy with these technologies enabled, after all.