What Is a DMA Cheat? How DMA Cards Work in Games

DMA cheats are the most expensive kind of cheat setup, and the one surrounded by the most myths. The idea behind them is simple: if anti-cheat watches the gaming PC, run the cheat somewhere else.

What DMA means

Direct memory access is a hardware feature as old as the PC. It lets a device move data to and from memory on its own, without the processor copying every byte. Your graphics card uses it to load textures. Your SSD uses it to load files. Your network card uses it to deliver packets. It is a normal, essential part of how a computer works.

A device that can use DMA over the PCIe bus, the slots on your motherboard, can in principle read any part of the system’s memory. That is the property a DMA cheat relies on.

How a DMA cheat works

A DMA setup has three parts.

A card in the gaming PC. A PCIe board, usually built around a programmable chip called an FPGA, plugs into a spare slot. To the gaming PC it can look like an ordinary device. Its real job is to read memory over the bus.

A second computer. The card connects by cable to another PC. That second machine runs the cheat software. It asks the card for the memory it needs, such as the list of players and their positions, and does all the cheat’s work: finding players, projecting them onto the screen, choosing aim targets.

A way to see and act. The second PC has to show the result somewhere and, for an aimbot, move the aim. Some setups show the ESP on a second monitor. Others use a device that merges the two PCs’ video into one picture. Aiming is usually done through a hardware box that the gaming PC sees as an ordinary mouse.

The appeal is that nothing from the cheat runs on the gaming PC. No program, no driver, nothing inside the game’s process for a scan to find.

What a DMA setup costs

The hardware alone typically runs to around $200 to $600, before the second computer and the display and input gear. On top of the cost there is setup: matching firmware, configuring two machines and keeping the cheat’s game data current after every patch. That is a lot of money and work compared with a software build that runs on the PC you already own.

How anti-cheats fight DMA

DMA moved the cheat off the gaming PC, and anti-cheats followed it into the hardware.

Checking the devices

A DMA card has to sit on the PCIe bus, and anti-cheats can look at what is there. Cards that pretend to be ordinary devices have to get every detail of that disguise right, and anti-cheats look for the ones that do not.

IOMMU: a firewall for memory

The bigger change is the IOMMU, a part of modern processors that controls which memory each device may touch. With it switched on and used properly, a card in a PCIe slot can only reach the memory it has been given. It cannot read the game.

Anti-cheats have started to require it. FACEIT began rolling out IOMMU and virtualization-based security requirements in 2025, enforcing them first for its highest-rated players, and describes the IOMMU as a firewall for your RAM aimed squarely at DMA cards. Riot’s Vanguard lists it among the requirements for its newer on-demand mode. More will follow.

Behaviour still counts

Even a perfectly hidden DMA setup produces the same in-game behaviour as any other cheat. Tracking players through walls or impossible reaction times show up in replays and statistics whatever hardware produced them, which is the behavioural layer described in how anti-cheat detects cheats.

DMA compared with software cheats

DMA is the extreme end of the internal and external spectrum: external, and off the machine entirely.

Do you need DMA?

For most players and most games, no. Our builds run as software on a normal Windows PC, and the rare exception that needs extra hardware is flagged on its game page. The Rust build is internal and software only, with no DMA card, second PC or capture card. The DayZ build runs its aimbot on official servers with no DMA hardware.

DMA also does not buy certainty. As the Rust page puts it, a DMA setup would not be a guarantee against Easy Anti-Cheat anyway. No setup is ever guaranteed, which is why live status exists and why the way you play matters as much as the hardware.

Common misconceptions

“DMA is undetectable.” It moves the cheat, it does not hide it. Device checks and IOMMU requirements exist specifically to catch DMA.

“DMA cards are only for cheating.” DMA is a normal hardware feature, and FPGA boards are widely used for hardware development and security research.

“DMA gives better features.” A DMA setup mostly reads memory. Software builds can offer everything a DMA setup can, plus features that need to work inside the game.