On March 20th, 2026 MSI released a BIOS update for B650 Tomahawk Wi-Fi motherboard. One of the changes says "Implemented the anti-cheat mechanism."
I looked around their forums and people seem to agree that it refers to Microsoft Pluton security processor.
Does anybody know what this change is actually about? Is it another initiative by Microsoft to further lock people out of their computers? Would it somehow hinder using Linux with this motherboard?
Can someone explain to me why cheating shouldn't be solely caught and prevented on the servers these games run on? Why the hell are they diving into control on my own system?
In basic terms, your computer has to say something like I clicked here, to send it to the server and orchestrate with the other clients. On the flip side the server sends stuff back that your client can show you were the other clients are. All this raw data can be used by a cheater however they want. If we minimise the data available to you or a cheater to be the levellest, that would be the client only sends mouse and keyboard inputs, and all the client gets back from the server is pre-rendered frames. Think game streaming, from a cheating perspective is the problem solved? No, they just make a program to read screen and move the mouse when it sees an enemy faster than any human can, or more realistically to avoid that detection, just act slightly better than the cheaters opponent. As other comments have mentioned, game streaming for everyone would be expensive for the server. And if your clever you'll realise that even BIOS level detection won't stop a separate computer with a webcam doing keyboard mouse emulation, hence the comments about the developers wanting control. AI deepfakes can attest that even gameplay moderation will get more difficult as the input emulation gets more human like.
So the only hope is to do enough of all these things so that cheaters deem it not worth the effort/not profitable enough.
That would require them to run more servers, any extra CPU time is an indirect cost. By moving anti cheat to the client (along with other stuff like hit detection,) then they are only spending the customers CPU time not their server CPU time.
It's about money.
It's all about control. They demand control over servers, not allowing you to self host. They also demand control over communities, by putting them all in one big server or other controlled channels (but sometimes refusing to properly moderate them like in league of legends).
Now, they want to control your device.
You make it sound like a conspiracy to control our lives instead of a profit-maximization behavior. It's cheap and easy to lock you out and expensive to build things more robustly. The cost to your privacy, autonomy, etc. isn't passed on to them because typical consumers don't know or care what they're giving up. This is what regulations are for but it's all a little late for that
Sad people still play that garbage