Riot’s Vanguard Update Reportedly Destroys $6,000 DMA Cheat Hardware Used in Valorant

Riot Games has reportedly rolled out a major new update for its Vanguard anti-cheat system, and according to the competitive gaming community, the changes are already causing massive problems for advanced cheating hardware used in Valorant.

The update specifically targets DMA devices - highly specialized hardware tools designed to bypass traditional anti-cheat detection methods by directly accessing a PC’s memory. These devices have become some of the most expensive and sophisticated cheating solutions in competitive gaming, with certain setups reportedly costing as much as $6,000 for a single configuration. Now, many of those devices appear to have suddenly stopped functioning.

According to reports from cheat-tracking communities and hardware forums, Riot’s updated version of Vanguard now performs security verification much earlier during the Windows boot process. By checking system integrity before many external devices fully initialize, the anti-cheat can reportedly detect or block DMA-based tools before cheats even gain access to game memory.

This change has caused serious issues for users relying on expensive DMA setups, including premium H2 boards that were previously considered extremely difficult to detect. For years, these devices gained a reputation inside cheating communities as some of the safest and most “invisible” solutions available. That reputation may now be collapsing.

Images circulating online allegedly show piles of unusable DMA boards and hardware setups worth anywhere between $100,000 and $200,000 combined. While some of these claims are impossible to independently verify, the reaction across cheating forums suggests the new Vanguard protections have already disrupted a significant portion of the high-end cheating market.

DMA cheating has long been considered one of the biggest challenges for competitive multiplayer games. Unlike traditional software cheats running directly on the same PC, DMA devices operate through external hardware connected to the motherboard, often using PCIe interfaces to read memory independently from the operating system.

Because of this architecture, DMA tools became extremely difficult for normal anti-cheat systems to monitor or detect. Many modern cheat developers began shifting toward hardware-assisted systems specifically because software-based cheats were increasingly vulnerable to detection waves and kernel-level security systems.

Vanguard itself has always been controversial because of how deeply it integrates into Windows. Riot designed the anti-cheat to operate at kernel level, giving it extremely high access privileges over the system. Critics argued that this approach raised privacy and security concerns, while Riot insisted it was necessary to combat increasingly advanced cheat technologies.

The latest update appears to reinforce Riot’s aggressive stance against cheating. Instead of only scanning the game environment itself, Vanguard now reportedly focuses more heavily on verifying hardware integrity during system startup, closing loopholes previously exploited by DMA-based tools.

The competitive Valorant community has largely reacted positively to the news. Many players have spent years complaining about high-level cheating in ranked matches, particularly from users employing expensive hardware solutions that were almost impossible to detect through conventional systems.

Some professional and semi-professional players even described DMA cheating as one of the most dangerous threats to competitive integrity because of how difficult it was to trace compared to standard cheat software.

At the same time, the update also reignited debate around kernel-level anti-cheat systems. Supporters argue that increasingly advanced cheats require equally aggressive security solutions, while critics remain concerned about the amount of system-level access these anti-cheat platforms maintain.

For Riot, however, the strategy appears to be working. Vanguard has consistently been positioned as one of the strictest anti-cheat systems in modern competitive gaming, and the company continues investing heavily into anti-cheat research and hardware-level detection technologies.

The broader gaming industry is also closely watching these developments. As cheating methods become more advanced and increasingly hardware-based, anti-cheat systems across multiplayer gaming may eventually adopt similar approaches focused on early boot verification and hardware authentication.

For now, though, the immediate result is clear: one of the most expensive cheating ecosystems in competitive gaming appears to have taken a major hit, and Riot’s latest Vanguard update may have effectively “killed” large numbers of DMA devices that were once considered untouchable.