[STEAM] Riot Games is making an anti-cheat change that could be rough on older PCs

[Steam 0]

At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of

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, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windows security features like

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, a TPM 2.0 module, and

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.

Riot Games, best known for titles like Valorant and League of Legends and the Vanguard anti-cheat software, has often been one of the earliest to implement new anti-cheat requirements. There’s already

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that systems need to clear before they’ll be allowed to play Riot’s games online, and now the studio is announcing

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: a BIOS update requirement that will be imposed on “certain players” following

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that could allow especially dedicated and motivated cheaters to circumvent certain memory protections.

In short, the bug affects the input-output memory management unit (IOMMU) “on some UEFI-based motherboards from multiple vendors.” One feature of the IOMMU is to protect system memory from direct access during boot by external hardware devices, which otherwise might manipulate the contents of your PC’s memory in ways that could enable cheating.

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