What is a Radar Hack?
A radar hack is a category of video-game cheat that displays the real-time positions of all enemies on a 2D mini-map overlay regardless of whether those enemies would normally be visible on the in-game radar. Radar hacks read enemy world-space coordinates from the game's entity list and plot them onto either the existing mini-map or a separate top-down overlay. They are popular in tactical shooters (Counter-Strike, PUBG, Tarkov) where map awareness is the primary skill.
A radar hack is the map-awareness equivalent of an ESP. Where ESP draws information about enemies directly onto the player's screen at their world-space position, a radar hack draws a top-down 2D map showing where every enemy currently is. In games where mini-maps are part of the legitimate UI (Counter-Strike, PUBG, Apex Legends), a radar hack typically extends the existing mini-map. In games without a built-in mini-map (Tarkov, hardcore extraction shooters), the radar hack adds a new overlay.
How a radar hack works
The cheat reads each enemy's world-space position from the entity list — the same data structure that aimbots and ESPs use. It transforms those coordinates from 3D world space to 2D map space using either the game's own map projection (when one is exposed) or a manually-calibrated transform per map. The result is rendered either by hooking the game's mini-map render call and inserting additional enemy markers, or by drawing a separate top-down overlay window that displays alongside the game viewport.
Implementation variants
- Mini-map injection — modifies the in-game mini-map to display enemy dots
- External web radar — sends entity-position data over websocket to a separate browser-based map running on a second monitor, phone, or tablet. Common in Counter-Strike, CS2, and Tarkov ecosystems where the host PC runs only a thin client.
- DMA radar — entity data is read by a DMA card on a second PC and the radar renders on the second PC's display. Completely invisible to the gaming PC's anti-cheat. See what is a DMA cheat.
- Voice radar / callout radar — uncommon but exists; an external program reads enemy positions and speaks callouts ("two enemies long A") via text-to-speech so the cheat doesn't require any visual overlay
Why radar hacks are popular
Radar hacks are the safest information cheat for many use cases. They don't move the player's crosshair, they don't appear on the gameplay screen for stream-detection, and the external/DMA variants don't appear on the gaming PC at all. The player still has to actually shoot the enemies — radar hacks only provide positional awareness. Combined with a tuned humanized aimbot and discipline, radar hacks are the cleanest legit-cheat setup in shooters where map awareness is the dominant skill.
How anti-cheats detect radar hacks
Internal radar hacks that hook the mini-map are caught by the same render-pipeline scans that catch ESP. External web radars are harder — the cheat process is just reading memory and sending packets to a server, which kernel anti-cheats can detect via process memory scans for the cheat binary or by network behavior analysis. DMA radars are essentially undetectable client-side because the cheat is on a separate machine, but the IOMMU mandate from Fortnite (February 2026) and the PUBG 2026 roadmap targeting DMA cheats is reducing the safety of this lane. Behavioral detection — players who consistently pre-aim corners or rotate to off-map enemies — applies to radar hack users the same way it applies to wallhack users.
2026 detection landscape
Web radars and DMA radars are the dominant 2026 implementations in tactical shooters. The detection picture is moving toward IOMMU enforcement (Fortnite, PUBG, eventually Riot games) which targets the DMA hardware lane specifically, and toward behavioral analysis of player rotation patterns. For practical setup see how to configure ESP/wallhack since the configuration overlap is significant, and pair with our HWID spoofer pillar for the underlying hardware-identity layer.
Sources
- About Easy Anti-Cheat — Epic Games
- BattlEye Support FAQ — BattlEye Innovations
- PUBG Anti-Cheat — Krafton
Related Questions
Anti-cheats detect ESP and wallhacks primarily through three techniques: signature scanning for known rendering hooks and Direct3D/Vulkan overlays, behavioral analysis correlating player movement and pre-aim with information they "shouldn't have," and server-side fog-of-war culling where the server only sends visible-player data to each client. The 2026 trend is heavy server-side culling — Fortnite, Valorant, and Apex now send only client-visible player coordinates, making memory-read ESP less informative.
A DMA (Direct Memory Access) cheat is a hardware-based video-game cheat that reads the gaming PC's RAM through a PCIe expansion card installed in a second computer. The two PCs are connected by a fiber optic link (typically USB-C to a Squirrel firmware FPGA card), and the second PC processes game memory to render ESP, drive aimbot input, and operate radar — entirely outside the gaming PC's operating system. DMA cheats avoid software anti-cheats because no cheat code runs on the gaming PC.
A wallhack is a category of video-game cheat that allows the player to see enemies, items, or other game-state elements through solid geometry such as walls, terrain, and objects. Wallhacks are implemented either as visibility-checked ESP that highlights enemies even when occluded, or by modifying the game's wall material shaders to render walls transparent. Wallhacks are one of the oldest cheat types, dating to Quake 2 chams in the late 1990s.
ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) is a category of video-game cheat that overlays information about enemies, items, and game state onto the player's screen that the game would not normally reveal. Typical ESP features include 2D bounding boxes around enemy players, skeleton bones, health bars, distance text, weapon names, loot rarity highlights, and line-of-sight indicators. ESP is rendered either by hooking the game's render pipeline or by drawing through an external overlay.
