Playing Mass Effect with an AMD CPU has been a pretty weird experience. For nearly a decade, running the PC port on an FX or Ryzen processor would result in a strange graphical glitch, whereby character models rendered as ugly, black blobs in Noveria and Ilos. What’s interesting (and sad) is that nobody at AMD, BioWare, Demiurge Studios, or EA attempted to address it, but thanks to the work of talented game developer and modder Adrian (AKA Silent or CookiePLMonster), we finally have a fix that doesn’t involve disabling game features or modifying maps!
Silent has posted a technical, long-winded post for those of you who are interested in the specifics, but if you want to jump right to the patch, you can grab it here. The fix works for both Origin and Steam versions of Mass Effect.
“We have decided that the cleanest way to fix this issue is to provide a replacement d3dx9_31.dll, which forwards every function exported by Mass Effect to the system DLL, except for D3DXMatrixInverse,” wrote Silent. “For this function, we have developed a replacement using XMMatrixInverse.”
“A replacement DLL makes for a very clean and bulletproof installation, and it’s been confirmed to work fine with both Origin and Steam versions of the game. It works out of the box, without the need for an ASI Loader or any other third party software.”