Mass Effect Re-Normalized on Ryzen CPUs

The first Mass Effect wowed everyone with its meticulously crafted universe, engaging story, and beloved characters. Two sequels followed, completing a trilogy that, for many, rivaled even Star Wars.

Then, AMD released its Ryzen CPUs, and this classic turned to blobs. Black blobs, to be precise.

Mass Effect was semi-incompatible with Ryzen CPUs for nine years

And nobody seemed to know why… When running on AMD’s latest processors, the game presented character models as flat black blobs with zero detail. Not the best way to experience a gaming classic.

The bug became game developer Adrian’s Holy Grail, a gordian knot he had to solve. This bug is so interesting, as he explained in a detailed blog post, because it’s one of the sporadic cases where a problem with graphics isn’t related to the GPU. Instead, it’s the CPU who’s at fault, with the game’s engine glitching when it tries to use SSE2 on AMD processors.

After finding the culprit, Adrian made a patch for the beloved classic, which you can find at Github. You can also read more about his adventures battling those cursed black blobs for close to a decade, so check it out!