this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Recently there was a thing where VAC would erroneously flag AMD's antilag+ feature as cheating, and issue a ban.

AMD then quickly disabled the feature by default but now Valve also patched detection for it and is now, at least according to these patch notes, reversing the bans.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

They weren't erroneously flagging anything. The driver wasn't so much a driver as much as a locally hosted man in the middle attack. It wasn't necessary for the functioning of the graphics card it was literally intercepting commands and altering them, which is exactly what cheating software does.

The only way they could have patched the software to not flag it would have been if AMD had told them in advance of what they were doing. Which I have no idea why they didn't do because it was blatantly obvious this exact issue was going to happen.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Devils advocate: they can't always know what their engineers did would interfere with something like anti cheating software because it can honestly not be something they thought about. It is also hard to know if AMD has CS2 in their testing suite.

Realistically, they should have ran some beta testing with consumers or in house. On top of that they should have been more clear with how it worked with the public before releasing this very intrusive mechanism in their drivers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Except that they know how, anti-cheating software works at least a day theoretical level, they know how their software works, they know the thing that their software does is something that cheating software does again at a theoretical level. Just on first principles alone it should have been possible for them to work this out without having to have any expert knowledge or have the game in their testing suite.

That's all forgetting that apparently not a single person in the software department, the management department or the QA department (assuming they have one) apparently knows anything about games development. Really?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it's really not amds job to know how anti cheat works I'm gonna be honest most software devs probably could give a rats ass how it works the software devs probably were just like this works and isn't causing crashes ship it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nah there is no defending amd in this. How would altering game files and rerouting dll's not result in getting a ban from almost any half decent AC.

And yes it is their job to know how games work, they're the ones making drivers for a gaming gpu.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I agree. You don't ship software that alters a competitive game's DLLs without spending 5 minutes to discuss potential side effects. This was a major oversight.