Upon further investigation, Adrian found that the issue was related to NaN values in pixel shader constants, but even after fixing the issue some of the in-game character models were still rendering as ‘dark grey’ images. The problem was first isolated to the Processor Specific Graphics Pipeline (PSGP) and Adrian found out that disabling this feature corrected the issue. Though, according to Adrian, this doesn’t seem to be the case, because the game does not use that instruction set directly.

There are few existing workarounds that can fix this ‘black character texture’ issue, but the game developer decided to find out the root cause of this problem.Īfter some investigation, it appears that AMD’s FX and Ryzen processors don’t support the 3DNow! Instruction set, so the previous assumption was that the game engine will try to use these instructions whenever it detects an AMD processor. This seems to be the only graphical bug to affect particular CPUs from a specific vendor, which is AMD in this case. As you can see from this video the character models are all in ‘black shapes’.Īs game developer Adrian points out in his lengthy blog post, vendor-specific game bugs are certainly not new, but they are typically related to GPU or driver issues. Just in case you didn’t know about this old Game glitch/bug, when Mass Effect was released, the PC port was affected by a mysterious ‘blocky’ character texture issue, when AMD released its Bulldozer-based CPUs in 2011, and it even effects all the current AMD Ryzen processors.

After 9 years game developer Adrian who also goes by the name Silent or CookiePLMonster, has finally fixed the strange ‘black blob’ artifacting/glitch issue in Mass Effect, that only impacted AMD FX and Ryzen processor systems.

Mass effect black blob fix