AMD Anti-Lag 2 SDK Now Available at GPUOpen For Direct Game Integration

AMD promises improved latency reduction with the Anti-Lag 2 SDK, which is now available to game developers through GPUOpen.

Today, AMD announced the availability of its newest Anti-Gag technology, the Radeon 'Anti-Lag 2'. The Anti-Lag 2 improves the game's latency for a quicker response overall by optimizing the game processing pipeline, enhancing the gameplay for competitive gamers. AMD tweeted on X, saying,

Looking to get even more out of our Anti-Lag technology?

Now you can reduce your game latency even further by integrating Anti-Lag 2 directly into your game, with the GPUOpen release of its SDK!

The new technology is built on GPUOpen, a platform for open-source tools, technologies, and resources created for game developers. The Anti-Lag 2 SDK will offer the necessary tools, libraries, and documentation, allowing the developers to integrate Anti-Lag 2 directly into their games to reduce game latency.

As competitive and fast-paced games require quick responses to win the match, reduced game latency can significantly affect the gameplay experience, which is what the Anti-Lag 1 did. The Anti-Lag 1 was released in 2019, which was able to reduce the latency by a few milliseconds. In May 2024, the Anti-Lag 2 preview was made available in Counter-Strike 2 which promised to reduce the response time even further.

Today, AMD has officially released the Anti-Lag 2 SDK for game developers to implement the technology into their games, which will move the point of latency reduction from the GPU driver level to within the game's logic. Typically, developers don't have control over the input peripheral latency and the display latency. However, by implementing the Anti-Lag 2 directly into the game's processing pipeline, just before the game polls for the user input, the latency can be reduced further.

Anti-Lag 1 just worked on the driver level, calculating the delay in the driver-side processing of the game's graphics commands and controlling the flow of data between the CPU and GPU. This ensured the CPU frames weren't going too ahead of the GPU frames, which improved the input-to-image latency. Apart from having a similar operation, Anti-Lag 2 can now allow optimal alignment of the internal processing pipeline by inserting a small delay just before the game polls for input.

AMD has explained and listed all the steps for integrating Radeon Anti-Lag 2 into the games and has also pointed out that it requires special attention when AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation is enabled. This is to ensure that developers can pay attention to the additional Anti-Lag 2 functions that are required for the new technology to know whether the frames are interpolated or not.