Set this to your monitor's native resolution (e.g., 1920x1080 ).
Windows "optimizes" older games in ways that often break them. Disabling these can stabilize the launch.
Once you get past the black screen, we highly recommend locking your frame rate to via your GPU control panel. The physics and AI in Conviction can act strangely when running at extremely high frame rates on modern hardware.
The most common cause for the black screen is the game trying to launch at an unsupported resolution or refresh rate. You can manually override this in the configuration files. Press Win + R , type %localappdata% , and hit Enter.