What is ESP in Video Games?
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.
ESP is the second pillar of the modern FPS cheat stack alongside aimbots. Where an aimbot acts on the player's behalf, an ESP only adds information — the player still aims and shoots — which makes it more permissive in terms of detection and the lowest-risk entry point for legit-style cheating. Almost every cheat menu today, from $4.99 software loaders to $1,500 DMA rigs, exposes some form of ESP as its core surface.
What ESP draws on screen
Standard ESP feature set, in order of how common each one is in 2026 menus:
- Box ESP — 2D rectangles tracking each enemy's bounding-box in world space, projected to screen space each frame
- Skeleton ESP — line segments connecting each enemy's bone joints (head, spine, hips, hands, feet)
- Health bar / armor bar — vertical bars next to each player showing remaining HP
- Snap lines / tracers — lines from your crosshair to each enemy origin
- Name tags and distance — text rendered above each enemy showing username, weapon, and meters to target
- Visibility check — recoloring the box red when the enemy has line-of-sight to the player, green when occluded
- Loot ESP — rarity-colored boxes around dropped weapons and equipment
- Vehicle / projectile ESP — useful in PUBG, Battlefield, Arc Raiders where vehicles and grenades matter
How ESP is rendered
There are three primary rendering architectures. Internal ESP hooks the game's own renderer (Direct3D11 Present, Direct3D12 ExecuteCommandLists, Vulkan QueuePresent) and draws using the same API the game uses, which means it appears inside the game's swap-chain and is invisible to standard screen-capture software. External ESP uses a separate transparent always-on-top window — usually a WPF overlay or a borderless DirectX window — that floats above the game and is drawn by a second process; this is what most DMA setups use. The third architecture is video-out tap rendering used by hardware DMA cheats with a separate display, where the ESP is drawn on a second monitor or capture-card pipeline.
How anti-cheats detect ESP
ESP is detected through a smaller set of vectors than aimbot. Internal ESP that hooks Direct3D is caught by anti-cheats scanning the present hook chain — EAC, BattlEye, and Vanguard all enumerate D3D vtables and check for unauthorized detour bytes. Process scans pick up known overlay window classes (PhantomOverlay's window class was burned in 2024 for example). Behavioral telemetry can catch ESP indirectly: a player whose pre-aim consistently flicks toward enemies behind walls before the engagement is flagged for replay review. NeacSafe in Marvel Rivals added a specific check for transparent always-on-top windows of suspicious size in late 2025. We cover this in our ESP detection answer.
ESP vs wallhack — terminology
The terms ESP and wallhack are often used interchangeably but they are not identical. A wallhack specifically refers to seeing through walls — either via ESP visibility through occlusion or via modifying material rendering so wall textures become transparent. ESP is the broader category and includes information overlays that don't necessarily relate to walls (loot rarity, distance text, projectile prediction). In modern usage, "wallhack" usually means visibility-checked ESP.
2026 detection landscape
The single biggest 2026 shift for ESP is video-out tap detection. Fortnite's February 2026 IOMMU mandate combined with PUBG's 2026 anti-cheat roadmap targeting DMA explicitly mean that the external/DMA category of ESP is increasingly fragile. Internal ESP through swap-chain hooks remains stable for cheat vendors who can pass driver-level scans. For practical config see our ESP configuration guide, and for understanding how this all fits with hardware identity see the HWID spoofer pillar.
Sources
- About Easy Anti-Cheat — Epic Games
- BattlEye Support FAQ — BattlEye Innovations
- ExecuteCommandLists API — Microsoft Learn
Related Questions
Internal cheats run as code injected directly into the game process — typically a DLL loaded into the game's address space — and access game memory directly through pointer dereferences. External cheats run as a separate process (or on a separate machine) and access game memory via inter-process APIs like ReadProcessMemory or via DMA hardware. Internal cheats offer better performance and richer rendering options; external cheats offer better detection isolation. Modern paid cheats are mostly external with internal renderers for ESP.
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.
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.
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.
An aimbot is a video-game cheat that automatically aims the player's weapon at enemies by reading game memory to locate enemy positions, calculating the angle from the player's camera to the target, and writing or simulating the input needed to snap or smooth the crosshair onto that target. Aimbots range from "rage" full-snap variants used openly to "legit" humanized variants that mimic real player flicks. They are the most common and most heavily detected category of FPS cheat.
