Fortnite adds more anti-cheat requirements, including Secure Boot and TPM, so it might be time to get tinkering in that BIOS

Come February 19, Epic Games says Fortnite will require additional hardware features to help prevent cheating. Two of these you probably already know about, these being Secure Boot and TPM, but the third you might not be so familiar with.

This latter feature is IOMMU, which is part of a motherboard and helps ensure there are no untrusted devices attached to your system. Most modern motherboards have it—Epic says "If your PC is Windows 11-compatible (~95% of Fortnite players on PC), you likely already meet these requirements", including IOMMU—but you might need to enable them in your BIOS.

The IOMMU (input–output memory management unit) is a go-between the system memory and devices such as PCIe ones, mapping virtual addresses to physical ones. It's also supposed to act as a preventative measure or check against devices accessing your system before your operating system loads.

There's been a fair amount of talk about it recently because of the possibility of it allowing memory to be hijacked via a PCIe device before the operating system loads, because there was previously a small window during which its direct memory access (DMA) protection mechanisms weren't activated. Which is why Asus released an important BIOS update for its motherboards a couple of months ago, to patch it.

This BIOS update, along with similar ones from Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock, was then made a requirement to play Valorant. That's because, as Riot explained in a blog post, the game relies on IOMMU to check your memory and only allow approved devices to communicate with the game. If there's a chance this protection process could have been hijacked or interfered with during boot-up, that might not spell good news for its anti-cheat. The BIOS updates patched this potential hijack window.

While Valorant previously required IOMMU and then, after this vulnerability was discovered, required BIOSes to be updated to ensure the feature is airtight, Fortnite didn't previously require IOMMU at all. That's what's changing: the game will soon require this feature. Alongside TPM and Secure Boot, which Valorant also already required.

Epic Games explains: "On February 19, we’re expanding Fortnite’s Anti-Cheat system requirements for PC players to all tournaments, requiring three security features to be enabled: Secure Boot, TPM, and IOMMU.

IOMMU is a security feature that helps the operating system control how hardware devices access system memory. This technology allows us to better protect our game memory from being accessed by cheat hardware."

It's unclear whether the game will require the latest BIOS updates to patch the aforementioned vulnerabilities with IOMMU, like Valorant does. It's probably best to keep your BIOS up-to-date just in case.

TPM and Secure Boot are also required, of course, and we've seen these requirements in big games such as Battlefield 6, Black Ops 7, and more recently, Highguard. Windows 11 itself requires a Secure Boot-capable motherboard with a TPM (trusted platform module), which most Windows gamers know about by now.

It's not really a surprise that Fortnite is adding more anti-cheat requirements. It's one of the slowly growing number of games that have super strict requirements thanks to its kernel-level anti-cheat, a fact that I'm all too aware of since trying out Linux. It's on the mental list that I lug around of games I can't go near when using that OS, alongside Valorant and Apex Legends, among others.

Pros and cons, I suppose.