DMA Cheats vs Firmware Cheats
What's the Difference?
Both claim to be undetected — but they work completely differently. Here's an honest technical breakdown of each approach, what makes them detectable or not, and what the trade-offs actually are.
How DMA Cheats Work
DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. A DMA cheat uses a hardware card — typically an FPGA-based PCIe card — plugged directly into your motherboard. This card reads your PC's RAM over the PCIe bus, bypassing the CPU and operating system. A second PC receives the data and runs the cheat overlay.
What makes DMA interesting:
- The cheat software runs on a completely separate machine
- Windows and the anti-cheat see no suspicious processes on the gaming PC
- No kernel driver is loaded on the gaming PC
The limitations of DMA:
- Requires two PCs plus a relatively expensive FPGA card (€150–€400)
- Modern anti-cheats like FACEIT AC have added PCIe bus scanning — they can detect the presence of certain DMA cards on the bus even without reading their memory
- FACEIT AC scans for known DMA card signatures, requiring users to spoof their card's device ID — an arms race with no clear end
- Setup is complex and hardware-dependent
How Firmware Cheats Work
A firmware cheat operates at a level below the operating system entirely. Instead of running on a second PC or loading a driver into Windows, the cheat logic lives inside the motherboard's firmware — a privileged execution environment built into every modern motherboard that runs below the kernel and is completely invisible to it.
Anti-cheat software, no matter how sophisticated, runs at the highest level Windows allows. It cannot inspect, detect, or interfere with anything executing at the firmware level.
What makes firmware cheats different:
- There is nothing to detect inside Windows — no process, no driver, no module, no PCIe card
- FACEIT AC's kernel driver has no visibility into the firmware layer
- The cheat survives Windows reinstalls — it lives in firmware, not the OS
- Radar requires no second PC — a real-time Android app receives and displays every player's position, team, and health directly on your phone
The trade-offs:
- Requires a compatible motherboard with BIOS update capability
- Installation is more complex than installing software
- Not compatible with every motherboard model
Side-by-Side Comparison
The fundamental difference is not sophistication — it's architecture. DMA cheats operate in a layer Windows can see (the PCIe bus). Firmware cheats operate in a layer Windows cannot see. FACEIT AC can, in principle, detect anything running at or above the kernel level. It has no mechanism to detect anything running below it.
Which Approach Does FACEIT Cheats Use?
Our products are built on the firmware approach. The cheat runs entirely outside Windows, at a level the anti-cheat is structurally unable to reach. There are no drivers, no hooks, no external cards on the PCIe bus — nothing for FACEIT AC to find.
This is not a cat-and-mouse game with signatures and updates. The anti-cheat simply has no mechanism to inspect the layer we operate in.
Ready to see the products?
Radar, ESP and SoftAim — firmware-based, HWID locked, one-time installation.
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