Riot Games’ controversial anti-cheat Vanguard has drawn new attention after a new update reportedly made Valorant’s expensive cheat hardware unusable. Riot teased hardware cheats on the X, saying “congratulations to owners of the new $6k paperweight,” after the update appeared to block DMA-based cheat setups that rely on expensive external hardware.
The comments sparked a debate about what Vanguard actually did. Some posts have labeled the issue as SSD damage, but Riot clarified that Vanguard does not damage PC hardware or disable actual SSDs. The update targets hardware and firmware cheats used to bypass Valorant anti-cheat systems.
What is DMA cheating?
DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. It’s a standard hardware function that allows devices to access program memory without routing every request through the CPU. In cheat setups, DMA can be abused to read game memory without the usual software layer.
A DMA device can be connected to a PC via PCIe, allowing hackers to use tools like radar, wallhacks, or ESP with a separate device. These setups are often expensive and use special programmable hardware made to look like standard PC devices, making them difficult to detect.
What changed Riot?
The latest Vanguard update appears to target a loophole used by high-profile cheating setups that rely on external hardware rather than traditional software. These devices impersonate trusted components like storage drives, allowing them to access game data while avoiding easy detection.
To counter that, Riot seems to be enforcing strict use of the IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit), a hardware memory protection system that controls which connected devices are allowed to access them. By turning off those permissions, Vanguard can prevent suspicious external hardware from reading live game data, effectively cutting off DMA cheating built around.
Is the Riot “brick” a real SSD?
According to Riot, Vanguard does not damage hardware, disable devices, or brick PCs, PC components, or software. The company says the affected devices are DMA cheat tools sold for Valorant cheats, not regular SSDs or PC components. Some affected users said they needed to reinstall Windows because their systems ended up unusable.
Riot says the instability occurs when IOMMU protection is enabled and the cheat setup continues to try to access protected memory. In that case, the system may generate hardware errors or become unstable. This is the expected behavior of the IOMMU when a device tries to read memory that is no longer allowed to access.
Why this has sparked the trust debate
Public reaction has been divided. Many players on X and Reddit mocked the affected cheaters, saying that anyone who spends thousands on DMA cheating hardware deserves to lose access to it.
Others were uneasy about what this would mean for the players. Some Reddit users have questioned whether kernel-level anti-cheat should be able to block hardware at this level. Players are asking what would happen if the official hardware was marked incorrectly. Some worry that false positives could block access to the actual NVMe or SATA drive and force a reinstall of Windows. Riot has denied that Vanguard disables regular PC devices or bricked PCs and PC components, but not everyone is convinced.
Stopping cheaters is important in a competitive game like Valorant, but kernel-level anti-cheats raise ethical questions because they reside deep within the player’s system. If anti-cheat can limit the behavior of the hardware, even for a valid reason, it creates a problem of trust between the game maker and the player.
