Just to have it available for reference, since, very surprisingly to me, the question (had been) coming up often, I am posting a description and a pair of the primary explanations.
Under only two circumstances that I am familiar with, the game will try to start, but none of the optional choices will show up in menus. There was one, original, primary reason that it happened. There is a secondary, very infrequent situation, and a third showed up later, as well.
Primarily, it was caused by trying to run the game with extremely obsolete hardware. Six years ago, nVIDIA and Microsoft were in litigation over the status of the original Xbox's video component's pricing, and Microsoft had placed the Xbox360 contract for video with ATI. The Geforce GF4 cards had been a sort of place-holder generation that essentially was merely an extension to the GF3, Direct3D / Dx8 generation. But they were very fast at running Dx8 code. Halfway through the GF4 cards' production run, ATI already had Dx9 cards for sale, in their Radeon 9n00 family.
Instead of including the Microsoft Dx8 and Dx9 shaders in the Geforce FXes, nVIDIA had tried to break away from Microsoft with an independent shader engine, that understood Dx8 and Dx9, but had as its own native shader "languge" something else entirely. The FXes were terrible at running Dx8. Much worse than the GF3s and GF4s had been. They were still worse with Dx9. Before the FX generation was replaced by the Geforce 6n00 generation, three almost totally reengineered FXes were rushed to market that literally had one and a half cores in them.
The Dx8 shader capabiliy from the GF4 Ti-4n00 cards was grafted onto an improved FX core to create the FX 5700, FX 5900, and eventually the FX 5950. The size of the FX chip practically doubled and the heat output rose by 50%. Only the very last one, the 5950, could match and outrun the slowest of ATI's own first Dx9 video cards, the Radeon 9600 series (although by that point, ATI was selling the newer Xn00 generation cards).
Dragon Age: Origins is apparently using some SM2 or SM3 shader code for menus that Geforce FXes cannot display at all. Incidentally, the game's configuration utility does recognize the Radeon 9n00 cards, and rejects them. Why it doesn't do the same with the Geforce FXes is a mystery to me.
Reason number two, seen only rarely, is a corruption of some game files, or of video driver files, which in the fiormer case, sometimes seems linked to using / misusing the game's Toolset.
Even less frequently, this condition is created through the corruption or total absence of required software (video drivers, Direct3D APIs, and part of the game's own functions).
Relatively recently compared to the causes for the symptom before, some people have been trying to force the game to accept screen settings that "belong" to the wrong type of displays. You cannot tell the game to use the older 4:3 display ratio settings with a newer wide screen 16:9 or 16:10 display. It cannot play correctly that way, and the menus won't show up. The other way around is also going to do the same thing.
P. S. While it might seem pretty much of a no-brainer to go from thie situation of being stuck with such an elderly video card (Geforce FX) straight on to "let's get another, better video card", the true facts are often contradictory. Far too often, the FX cards are part of a system that is equally old, and is simply a very poor basis to rebuild from. The CPU most likely is equally underpowered, the RAM is most likely too small, the available Hdd storage space may be cramped, and the power supply is almost totally worn out by now.
Not saying that other updates along the way haven't taken care of a few of these liabilities, just that the system has most likely already reached and gone beyond, the practical point of no return. The video bus is still AGP, and the range of options there are rather few. The RAM is only the original DDR, while the industry moved to DDR2 long ago and is already moving to DDR3, so the old stuff costs a lot more now in comparison. The CPU socket is still 778, or 939, and we've gone on past that awhile back. The list goes on from there.
Gorath
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Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 01 novembre 2011 - 03:46 .
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