Okay, they are not as good as those that were created by Crysis 2 modders, but they are way better than the ones of Crysis vanilla. Rockstar used higher resolution textures in pretty much everything, thus even the plants look really well. The game features semi-destructible environments, with Max and his enemies causing chaos during their shootouts. There are bendable plants and grass, although the interactivity is not at 1:1 ratio. Let’s hope that more developers will start taking advantage of the additional CPU cores. The only other game that offered such a tremendous difference was DICE’s Battlefield 3, a game that was developed – initially – for PCs. We’re talking about a 30fps difference between a dual-core and a quad-core. There were scenes where the difference between a dual-core and a quad-core was around 10fps, while other scenes had a 30fps difference. However, and contrary to other titles, Rockstar’s shooter takes full advantage of the additional CPU cores. Like most PC games, Max Payne 3 scales well on quad-cores. This also proves that most developers have not managed to take advantage of the PC hardware, especially when their games run worse than Max Payne 3 and don’t look as good as it. This basically means that PC gamers with older hardware will actually get a better gaming experience than console gamers, both in image quality and framerates. Max Payne 3 ran with 35-55fps on a GTX 275. We’ve also tried Max Payne 3 in Single GPU mode, and our findings were quite interesting. Perhaps the performance hit is quite high and that’s why Rockstar has disabled it for DX9 and DX10 cards. It’s really puzzling that such a feature is considered as a DX11-only option. And although DX10 cards do not support tessellation, they do support SSAO. Unfortunately – and even though the game supports DX10 – there were specific DX11 graphical features that could not be enabled. Max Payne 3 ran with constant 60fps at 1080p and our mixed settings, proving that an old GPU can still keep up and provide an amazing gaming experience. In our case, we used a mix between high and very high settings and were pleasantly surprised with how smooth the game was running. This means that players will be able to adjust their graphical options as long as those settings do not surpass the amount of the video RAM that is supported by their GPUs. Max Payne 3 looks amazing and like GTA IV, it comes with a vRam limiter. Apart from that scene though, the game was taking full advantage of both GPU cores, with a 96% SLI scaling. There was only one scene in the entire game where SLI scaling seemed low and that was during the rooftop chase of the third Chapter. It’s been a while since we saw a triple-A game with mind-blowing graphics scaling so well, so kudos to both Nvidia and Rockstar. What’s really impressive here is that the default SLI profile comes with amazing scaling. PC gamers won’t have to mess with the SLI profiles as Nvidia has already included one for Rockstar’s third person shooter. As always, we used an overclocked Q9650 (at 4.2Ghz) with 4GB RAM, a GTX295, Windows 7-64bit and the latest version of the Geforce ForceWare drivers. And we are delighted to report today that Max Payne 3 is the most optimized PC game of 2012. GTA IV runs the same on a dual-core and a quad-core CPU of the same family, proving that it does not actually take advantage of the extra cores. And even though some gamers claimed that there were gains with a quad-core, we can confirm today that most of them saw a performance jump due to moving on to CPUs with a better architecture. You see, after the awful GTA IV port, we couldn’t help but be suspicious about it. Although Rockstar stated that they’d offer us a proper PC version of Max Payne 3, we had our doubts.
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