In its ongoing fight against cheaters, Epic Games is introducing stricter hardware-level security requirements for its popular battle royale game "Fortnite" to strengthen the Easy Anti-Cheat anti-cheating system. It will first be applicable to PC players participating in official events. Starting from February 18, 2026, players who want to participate in "Fortnite" tournaments and other competitive events must enable functions such as TPM, Secure Boot, and IOMMU in the system, otherwise they will not be able to enter any official competitive matches.
The report pointed out that "Fortnite" is not the first game to require players' hardware security configuration. Previously, "Call of Duty: Black Ops 7" and "Battlefield 6" have confirmed that they require TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot as basic anti-cheating conditions. The difference is that "Fortnite" may become one of the first works to introduce IOMMU requirements in mainstream games; IOMMU is a memory integrity feature that is mainly used to prevent peripherals from direct access to system memory. Some high-level competitive platforms have also used it as an additional security tool to prevent plug-ins.
According to Epic, less than 5% of PC players currently do not meet these new anti-cheat hardware requirements. For this group of players, daily ordinary matching and entertainment modes will still remain open, but they will be excluded from any competitive events. Industry analysts believe that as anti-cheating methods increasingly rely on kernel-level and hardware-level mechanisms, it will be difficult for "Fortnite" to provide good support for handheld platforms such as Steam Deck in the short term, because such devices have compatibility and permission restrictions in terms of firmware, secure boot, and TPM.
At the same time, players are also concerned about the performance impact of IOMMU. Some players have reported on Reddit and other platforms that enabling IOMMU in the Windows environment may cause frame rates to drop or performance fluctuations in some games. However, this impact varies greatly between different system versions and hardware configurations, and there is currently no unified conclusion.
This adjustment is seen as another attempt by Epic to upgrade on the anti-cheating front: by requiring players to enable security features at the bottom of the system, it reduces the space for cheats to bypass traditional software detection through DMA and other methods. However, judging from the previous experience of similar games, it remains to be seen to what extent such hardware-level thresholds can inhibit cheating, and whether it will trigger players' backlash against device compatibility and performance losses.