Fix Splinter Cell : Conviction Crashes, ATI Issues, Black Screen Problems & More

The long awaited next installment of Tom Clancy’s stealth video game franchise, Splinter Cell : Conviction has now been released to the public. Despite the game receiving somewhat negative reviews (i.e. only a score of 6.5 from GameSpot), fans of the series seem to be eager to try the game out. I’ve had the chance to play with a legitimate copy (PC version) of the game for several hours and I’ve got to say it’s not the most optimized game out there. Although it ran fine without any showstopper bugs, there were some FPS issues and slowdowns present on even higher end gaming rigs. Anyways here’s our routine troubleshooting article for Splinter Cell : Conviction – hopefully this will help you resolve any nagging issues you have with the game (note that most of the fixes mentioned are ATI centric).

Black screen at launch, blank screen, stuttering or game hangs at start up

SC : C is known to have several issues with ATI video hardware. If you are an ATI video card owner, it’s strongly recommended that you upgrade to ATI Catalyst™ 10.4a Preview hotfix release that addresses some of these issues. Quoted from driver release notes:

Splinter Cell Conviction - Resolves stability issues in the game when using a Windows 7 / Windows Vista / Windows XP based system with an:

• ATI Radeon HD 3xxx Series of products

Splinter Cell Conviction - Resolves performance stuttering issues when using a Windows 7 / Windows Vista / Windows XP based system with an:

• ATI Radeon HD 2xxx Series of products
• ATI Radeon HD 3xxx Series of products
• ATI Radeon HD 4xxx Series of products
• ATI Radeon HD 5xxx Series of products

You may download 10.4a drivers from this page.

If you are an ATI card owner and if the above fix did not resolve your problem, you can try installing v10.5 drivers as specified in this forum thread. Please note that we did not test this solution.

Additionally, it’s imperative that you have the latest DirectX 9 monthly runtime installed if you are running the game in DX9 mode. You may download it from here.

Missing menu options and in game textures

If you are running into the issues with missing menu text, menu items or in game textures, try disabling Catalyst AI in Catalyst control panel. You need to do this in all applicable places (i.e. under the AI tab as well as All tab in CCC).

My screen resolution is not supported. What’s up?

This is not a technical fix but more like a UI issue. If you try to change the video resolution in Splinter Cell : Conviction, sometimes you may find the resolution that matches your display is missing from the list (for example some widescreen res). You might not notice it but you can actually scroll down the list of resolutions.

Cannot display video mode error – game starts up in a resolution unsupported by the monitor

If you get this error, you might have to manually edit the game configuration file and set a resolution compatible with your monitor. There is a detailed forum thread on UBISoft forums on how to do this – you may access it from here.

scc.exe stopped working error when trying to launch the game

Sometimes, the game might hang at launch when it tries to auto detect system components. If this happens, you can bypass the auto detection process, launch the game and manually adjust optimal settings yourself. Navigate to your game’s installation directory and rename the file systemdetection.dll to something else. Now launch the game – it will throw an error message but the game should launch instead of hanging.

This article is a work in progress – more issues/fixes will be added as they are discovered. Feel free to post any useful info as comments.

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