SDK Integration

While Scarlet Cortex's driver-level mode is impressive on its own, AMD says they will also release an SDK that allows developers to optionally provide first-class integration. The SDK exposes additional rendering data that the driver can't reliably reconstruct on its own, giving the neural renderer significantly more (and better) information to work with.


With SDK integration, developers can provide:

• Direct G-buffer access: albedo, world-space normals, roughness/metallic maps, and emissive data—eliminating guesswork from the shader introspection stage.
• Material and object IDs: explicit classification of surfaces (skin, hair, foliage, glass, water) so the model can apply specialized enhancement per material type.
• Light source metadata: position, type (point, spot, directional, area), color, and intensity for all active lights in the scene—giving the neural renderer ground truth about where light is coming from.
• HDR exposure and tonemapping parameters: the intended brightness curve for the scene, so FSR 5 can enhance within the correct luminance range.
• Scene context hints: indoor/outdoor flag, time of day, weather state—metadata that helps the model prioritize the right kind of enhancement.

The difference between driver mode and SDK mode is most visible on complex material interactions: transparent surfaces with refraction, multi-layered materials like car paint, and scenes with many overlapping light sources. In driver mode, the shader introspection gets most of these right, but the SDK removes the remaining ambiguity.

AMD tells us that several developers are already working on SDK integration for upcoming titles. The SDK uses the same FidelityFX framework that developers are already familiar with from FSR 4, which should lower the integration barrier.

Anti-Cheat and Multiplayer

A technology that modifies how a game looks like raises obvious questions about competitive multiplayer. Could FSR 5 enhance enemy player visibility? Could it make dark corners brighter or highlight characters against backgrounds? It definitely could.


AMD has taken a conservative approach for the launch phase. FSR 5 only activates in games that have been explicitly added to AMD's validated game list. This is a strict whitelist—if the game isn't on the list, the feature is unavailable, and there is no user override. AMD plans to relax this over time: once the technology has matured, the goal is to make FSR 5 available as a user-toggleable option in Radeon Software for any single-player game, similar to how NVIDIA allows DLSS overrides in the GeForce control panel today. Competitive multiplayer titles will remain on an exclusion list.

For multiplayer games with anti-cheat systems (EAC, BattlEye, Vanguard, etc.), the game's developer must additionally register an enhancement mask before the game can be whitelisted. This mask provides fine-grained toggles, to define which draw call categories FSR 5 is allowed to touch. A typical multiplayer configuration would allow enhancement of environment geometry, skyboxes, terrain, and static objects, while excluding all player models, HUD elements, and dynamic gameplay objects. The driver's mesh and shader classification system (described on the previous page) is what enables this per-category control.

Without developer opt-in, multiplayer games with active anti-cheat systems will simply never appear on the whitelist. The decision about what constitutes a competitive advantage is left entirely to the game's developer.

AMD has told us they are working with Activision, Ubisoft, and EA on early multiplayer whitelisting for several titles. For now, the launch whitelist consists entirely of single-player games and cooperative titles:

Supported Games (at Launch)

• Black Myth: Wukong
• Cyberpunk 2077
• F1 25
• God of War Ragnarok
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Mafia: The Old Country
• Stalker 2
• Starfield

As already touched on, AMD plans to eventually transition to a blacklist model, where FSR 5 is enabled by default in all games except those on an exclusion list of known competitive multiplayer titles. But that's a future milestone—at this early stage, the whitelist approach is the right call.