Fortnite tournaments to require Secure Boot, TPM and IOMMU on PC

Every Fortnite tournament will soon check the security settings of the PCs that enter it. In a post in its competitive rules library dated Tuesday, February 10, 2026, Epic Games said that starting February 19, PC players in all Fortnite tournaments must have three features switched on: Secure Boot, TPM and IOMMU.

The same post set out the publisher's most recent legal actions against cheaters, from a lifetime ban for a player who also attacked its servers to a court judgment won in 2025. Taken together, the two halves describe how Epic now fights cheating in its competitive mode: at the level of the machine before a match starts, and in court once a case is built.

Epic Games, competitive rules library post of February 10, 2026. The 95 percent figure is Epic's own estimate.

What changes on February 19

Until now, the security checks applied only to part of the competitive calendar. From February 19, Epic's post says, they are expanded to all tournaments. A PC player who wants to enter has to have Secure Boot, TPM and IOMMU enabled on the machine they play on.

Epic does not present this as a hardware upgrade. According to the post, a PC that is compatible with Windows 11, which Epic puts at about 95 percent of Fortnite players on PC, most likely meets the requirements already or can switch the features on without new hardware.

For each feature, the post points players to Epic's help pages on how to determine whether their PC is compatible. The requirement is written for PC players alone, and the post describes no exception.

Three features, three layers of the machine

The three features protect different moments and different parts of a computer. Epic described the first two when it made them mandatory for part of its calendar in February 2025, and the third in the February 10 post.

The order matters. In its February 2025 update, Epic explained that cheats often act like bootkits, malicious programs that load early in the startup of a computer. A cheat that loads first can hide from the program meant to catch it. Secure Boot closes that door by checking that what starts the computer comes from a trusted source.

TPM, short for Trusted Platform Module, is the witness. Epic's 2025 update describes it as a secure hardware component that can verify that other protections, such as Secure Boot, are enabled, in a way that is very hard for malware or cheats to tamper with. Without it, a machine could simply claim that Secure Boot is on.

IOMMU, the new name on the list, guards a different route. "IOMMU is a security feature that helps the operating system control how hardware devices access system memory," the post says. According to Epic, this helps protect the game's memory from cheat hardware, meaning physical devices used to cheat rather than software.

From Account Level 350 events to every tournament

The rule extends a requirement that has been in place for a year. In an anti-cheat update dated February 27, 2025, Epic said that from that day Windows PC players had to enable TPM and Secure Boot to enter tournaments that require an Account Level of 350 or higher, naming events of the Fortnite Champion Series, or FNCS, its main competitive circuit, among them. The Account Level is the level a player's account has reached in the game, so the threshold sets a minimum of experience before entry.

The 2025 requirement therefore protected the top of the competitive calendar, where the FNCS sits, and left the events below that threshold without the check.

The 2026 change moves on two fronts at once. It widens the scope from tournaments with an Account Level of 350 or more to all tournaments, and it adds a third feature, IOMMU, to the two already required.

Who it concerns

For most competitive players on a recent PC, Epic expects little disruption. Its estimate that about 95 percent of its PC players use Windows 11-compatible machines is the reason it gives: those PCs, the post says, likely meet the requirements already or can enable them without new hardware.

Players who were already entering tournaments with an Account Level threshold of 350 or more have lived with two of the three checks since February 2025. For them, the new step is IOMMU. Players who stayed in the lower tiers of the calendar, below that threshold, meet all three requirements for the first time.

The remaining share of PC players, those on machines that are not Windows 11-compatible, falls outside Epic's estimate. The post gives no figure for how many of them enter tournaments, and it does not describe any exception for older machines.

The legal track

The second half of the February 10 post is a record of Epic's cases. Most recently, the publisher said, it took legal action against a player who used cheats and launched DDoS attacks, floods of traffic meant to knock servers offline, against Epic's servers. The player received a lifetime ban from all Epic games and services. The post does not name the player or the court.

Epic then listed its actions throughout 2025. A tournament cheater ignored a lawsuit Epic filed, and the court ruled for the publisher, with a judgment of US$175,000. Epic also sued a person who developed and sold cheating software, along with several people who helped sell it; the post gives no outcome for that case. And it reached settlements with three people: a tournament cheater who helped others cheat, a cheat seller who also carried out DDoS attacks, and a person who stole and sold Epic accounts.

These cases were already part of the publisher's approach a year earlier. In its February 27, 2025 update, Epic reported a new lawsuit against a person who stole and resold Fortnite accounts, a lawsuit against a player who cheated in its tournaments, and a settlement with another tournament cheater. It also said that, after legal action, the makers of Cronus devices had removed Fortnite and Rocket League gamepacks and scripts that help people cheat from their website. Epic said that Cronus hardware, and any other device that gives a competitive advantage, is restricted and leads to a cheating ban.

"Cheating ruins games, creates unfair matches, and undermines the experience of Fortnite, for everyone in the lobby," the February 10 post says. On consequences, the post states that breaking the rules this way results in a ban at minimum, and may also bring legal repercussions and the loss of money made from these offenses.

The rest of the anti-cheat toolkit

The PC requirements are one layer of a wider system. In the February 10 post, Epic listed its other measures: fixing game-breaking exploits quickly, making the game's systems harder to reverse-engineer, using the kernel-level protection of Easy Anti-Cheat while the game runs, monitoring suspicious behavior with data and machine learning, and developing new detection methods. Kernel-level means the anti-cheat runs at the deepest level of the operating system, where it can see programs that try to hide from ordinary software. Epic also relies on reports that players file from inside the game.

A similar list appeared in the 2025 update, which added that Epic bans accounts for cheating based on technical evidence rather than suspicion, and that anyone found cheating is banned, with no exceptions. That update also announced a second chance policy, set to start in April 2025.

The policy separates ordinary players from competitors. A first-time offender can still log in and use text and voice chat during the year-long ban, but cannot matchmake into experiences made by Epic or by creators, or spectate other players. For a tournament player the same offense ends their tournament career at once, and may cost them the prize money they had already won. The 2025 update also said that lifetime cheating bans in effect for more than a year would be lifted under the new policy, while cheat sellers and players banned for life for other rule-breaking would see no change.

The February 19 requirements sit upstream of all of this. A ban or a lawsuit deals with a cheater after the fact; Secure Boot, TPM and IOMMU are checks on the machine itself, made before a tournament match is played. From that Thursday, a PC player without all three enabled no longer meets Epic's requirements for any Fortnite tournament.

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