Gaming Max Payne 3 graphics analysis

GTA IV also had terrible controls. It's probably a result of them tying character movement to their physics engine.

 

Could I just bring something up? I'm not sure if this is just me but I'm finding it quite maddening, as people keep saying they can "max" this game out at 1920 x 1080 (or 1200) on a 560ti/570/580. I have SLI 570s, and while I certainly don't want to complain about fps, I can't "max" out the game (full AA/ very high shadows etc) as it would want about 4gb of VRAM to do so. - I of course have 1.25gb. Is this just my game? I don't understand how people are "maxing" the game on a card with, at best, 1.5gb of VRAM?

 

From those screenshots it looks average at best and the system requirements for the highest settings seem ludicrous if that's as good as it gets.

I can only imagine some other locations must look far better.

 

Might be down to PCIe bandwidth, if there is a lot of swapping for 'lower' memory cards then a 16x 2.0 bandwidth would be essential. If you are running a computer that halves the bandwidth with 2 cards in, try taking one out and see what happens.

 

going SLi doesn't mean you get twice the performance. you need to drop your AA to make the game fit into your VRAM.

would you consider this maxed? it's butter smooth and very playable. on 5th chapter now.
http://i45.tinypic.com/2mhsxvo.jpg

 

That is, quite simply, odd. What other specs are you running?

I had MP3 with everything at full, and it ran fine. I didn't do an FPS benchmark, but I didn't see any areas of stuttering, implying 30fps+ throughout. At that resolution it shouldn't be needing excessive amounts of VRAM either.

One thing that could possibly make a difference would be if the game was installed to an SSD or not, due to streaming large textures?

 

Thanks for replying folks. I should say though that I wasn't having a whine about the performance of my system (although I admit I must have sounded like this), and I can run the specs that wuyanxu posted at a constant 60fps too. I was just wondering if people were able to run 8xMSAA with a 580 etc.

One interesting little tidbit I picked up however while testing, is that as far as I can work out, MP3 throws out incorrect VRAM usage numbers if you're running a multi GPU setup. For instance, MP3 shows my VRAM at ~2500mb, which is wrong as I only have 1280mb usable. However, it also doubles the numbers which various settings use, so when I put all settings to max and 8xMSAA, it showed 4gb of VRAM required rather than the circa 2gb which I believe such a setting requires. You can understand why my jaw hit the floor somewhat at that point!

 

BTW, here's my full specs:-

Intel Core I7 2600K @ 4.4ghz
MSI P67a-GD53 (B3)
8gb Corsair XMS3 1600mhz DDR3
2 x GTX 570 SLI
Crucial M4 256gb SSD (System + Games)
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB (Office/Development Programs + Storage)
Asus Xonar DG
Corsair HX850W

Deders mentioned something about PCI-E bandwidth, and I'm aware my board scales down to x8 for each slot when two cards are installed. Should this really matter though? I was under the impression that, for now at least, even a x4 slot would hardly be saturated by the swapping needed for today's games. Am I wrong on this- would I see any improvement with a board that allows x16 on both slots?

 

Am happy this is the case as D3DOverrider doesn't work with 64bit exe's, so Triple buffering isn't a problem and works seamlessly with pretty much any 32 bit app when configured correctly.

Despite how much of a buzz there is around the graphics, It runs smoothly enough for me (between 30-60fps) on my sig (@ 1920x1200 no less) with everything 'maxed' except for MSAA (FXAA wins again). Would be interested to see how the game configures itself when installing on a machine that has for instance 16GB instead of 4GB ram, or a card with 3GB ram, and if there is any noticeable image quality. Will have a good read of the articles you linked to.

I noticed this in one of the cutscenes, looks like someone forgot to implement texture filtering.