A Technical Look at Max Payne 3

To experience Max Payne 3 the way it’s meant to be played (to quote a certain GPU vendor), you’ll want to max out the “Quality” levels, enable HDAO, disable MSAA, enable ‘Very High’ FXAA and use your own judgment on tessellation. As mentioned on the first page of this article, the tessellation effect in this game is hit or miss, and based on our included screenshots, you should be able to decide whether it’s actually needed or not.

In our testing (using a GTX 580), we found performance hits to be: A) ~5 FPS when enabling ‘Very High’ tessellation, B) ~4 FPS when enabling ‘Very High’ FXAA and C) 5~20 FPS when using HDAO in lieu of SSAO, dependent on the scene. If you decide to use MSAA over FXAA, you can expect an FPS hit of 40~50%.

For our testing, we used the settings laid out above and AMD and NVIDIA’s most up-to-date drivers. The level benched was Chapter IX, checkpoint #2. Max begins out high in a favela, and makes his way through the town in search of Giovanna and Marcelo. Our benchmark begins as soon as the level begins, and ends right before his first battle with corrupt cops (~2 minutes).

At 1080p, NVIDIA has an obvious edge, though at 2560×1600, both cards even out. This could be due to the NVIDIA card being equipped with just 2GB of GDDR (vs. 3GB on the AMD card), but it’s hard to settle on that given 2GB has been sufficient for most other recent games.

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