I know it's super old game to patch but with AMD's rise to being top buy this gen for the first time in forever could we possibly get a patch that remove's Peak 15's reliance on AMD 3DNow which was made defunct back in 2010? Modern AMD CPUs don't have the tools the game is looking for on that level anymore. The console command "viewmode unlit" works to fix the problem but does so by removing all dynamic lighting from the game.
I have lost hope that they will fix this issue by now. Maybe if they ever decide to make a remaster, but BioWare hasn't made remasters yet and EA has only done so very rarely (Burnout Paradise).
There's a mod that fixes the issue: https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffect/mods/71/?tab=files
@wingedrunner and additional to @Fred_vdp
While I see how that is annoying, you're right, the culprit is that AMD decided to discontinue its own Instruction set AMD 3DNow after 2010.
It would be easy for them to keep it for backwards compatibility, but they decided to put it on the software developers that used a AMD technology...
For the rest, I agree with Fred. The only way that this get fixed is if they decide to remaster Mass Effect.
I've played this game since it came out, but was rocking an Intel i7-980 back then, then an i7-3770k, and just ran afoul of this bug in 2020 after building a new AMD 3800X/X570 system. I thought it was a glitch with recent mods I installed from Nexusmods until researching this issue. Now I'm dismayed to find that after hours of mod downloading/installing, only to uninstall everything thinking the mods were the issue, that they weren't the issue and it's these damned ancient 3dNow instructions are the issue.
I realize this game is 13 years old, but it's the start of one of the most popular franchisees in gaming history. This is a serious oversight sight by AMD and really needs to be addressed. This makes me wish I'd stuck with Intel for this build. (The 9900k still whomps the single core performance of the 3800x, although the multi core performance of the 3800X whomps the the 9900K, and apparently the 9900K doesn't have this blob issue).
Not really.
It's written into just about every instruction set manual, that you shouldn't just blindly assume and make use of certain features, but that you should instead first check the right bits in the CPUID (putting aside I am not aware of anybody having ever really proven it's 3dnow's fault). Blame is on the developers. Just like it is for shipping without properly configured PhysX.
And no, you don't need a whole remaster to fix this. You just need to remove an IF from the source code.
But of course, if it's not to make the game compliant with current law (aka keep selling at all), it's not worth the effort.
