Two numbers decide whether an anticheat belongs on your FiveM server: how much it protects you, and how much it costs you in FPS. Most vendors talk loudly about the first and stay very quiet about the second. This is a technical breakdown of both - including the exact resmon figures ZeroTrust runs on a 300-player server - written so you can decide honestly whether you even need a paid anticheat yet.

How anticheat performance is actually measured

In FiveM, performance is not a marketing claim - it is a measurable value. Every resource is profiled by resmon, the built-in resource monitor you open with the `resmon` command on the client and in the server console. It reports the CPU time each resource consumes per tick, in milliseconds. This is the ground truth, and it is the same tool your staff and your players can use to audit us. There is nowhere to hide.

Client-side cost competes with the game's frame budget. At 60 FPS you have ~16.6ms per frame. Anything the anticheat spends there is time the player's CPU and GPU don't get.
Server-side cost competes with your server tick. On a busy server every resource fights for the same CPU, and a heavy anticheat is the fastest way to turn a full lobby into a laggy one.

Our benchmarks: ZeroTrust on a 300-player server

We measured ZeroTrust under real load - a live server sitting at 300 connected players, not an empty test box. These are the sustained resmon figures with full detection and active blocking enabled:

Measured resmon at 300 players

Client-side: 0.05ms per tick. Server-side: under 0.5ms per tick. Both measured with detection and active blocking running - not a passive or idle mode.

Put that in context. On the client, 0.05ms out of a 16.6ms frame budget is roughly 0.3% of a single frame - statistically indistinguishable from zero and far below the threshold where a player could feel it. Server-side, staying under 0.5ms per tick at 300 players leaves the overwhelming majority of your CPU budget for your frameworks, scripts, and roleplay logic. In plain terms: no measurable FPS drop, no server tick degradation.

Be honest: you might not need a paid anticheat yet

Here is the part most vendors will never tell you. If you are running a small, recent server, or you are still in the testing phase - just trying to see whether your project is going to work at all - you do not need ZeroTrust. Paying for enterprise-grade detection before you have a community worth attacking is solving a problem you don't have yet.

In that situation, use a free or entry-level anticheat. FIREAC is a solid open-source option that will cover the basics while you find your footing. Ship your server, grow your player base, and come back to the conversation about serious protection when you actually have something to protect. We would rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need.

When ZeroTrust is the right call

The calculus changes the moment you run a serious community that is already being targeted. Once cheaters are actively probing your server - injecting menus, abusing events, spawning, exploiting - the entry-level tier stops being enough. At that point you need a tool that can do two things at once that normally pull against each other: massive detection with active, real-time blocking, and a footprint small enough that protection never costs you a single frame.

That pivot - heavy, aggressive enforcement on one side and near-zero resource cost on the other - is the entire reason ZeroTrust exists. The 300-player benchmark above is what that balance looks like in production: full enforcement, 0.05ms client, sub-0.5ms server, zero FPS drop.

How we keep the footprint this small

Lua written with a low-level mindset optimized to the maximum and spawning dedicated threads only when it is actually needed.
Event-driven detection reacts to what actually happens on the server rather than polling every tick for things that usually aren't there.
Heavy analysis is offloaded and processed asynchronously, so the main thread your game and server tick depend on is never blocked.
Telemetry is batched, keeping network and CPU cost flat as your player count climbs.

None of this is magic, and we are happy to have it audited - run `resmon` yourself. Protection that degrades the experience it is supposed to defend is a bad trade. The goal was always the same: catch everything, cost nothing. - Flo, Lead Dev Lua/Web/C++ & Reverse Engineer at ZeroTrust

The Real Performance Cost of a FiveM Anticheat: ZeroTrust Benchmarks at 300 Players