AMD’s previous attempt at a successor to the driver-levelRadeonAnti-Lag — Anti-Lag+ — launched in such a poor state thatmany 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 ofRadeon 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 releasedbenchmarkingresults inCounter-Strike 2running at Very High settings, with input latency compared between No Anti-Lag, Anti-Lag, and Anti-Lag 2. Anti-Lag 2 inCounter-Strike 2is achieving input lag as low as 11 ms, which seems on par with the sub-15 ms ranges thatNvidia so proudly toutson its page for Reflex inCounter-Strike 2.
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, andCounter-Strike 2is 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 thatRX 5000 series GPUsand newer from AMD are all covered, and that mostRyzen 6000 series CPUsand 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 needonly to download and install the new driver. SinceCounter-Strike 2is 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,Valvewill add back community server support forCounter-Strike 2sooner 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 mapsshould be a joy with these technologies enabled, after all.
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Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
