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Max Payne 3
The latest chapter in the Max Payne series wasn't made by the same developers as the first two games, but it follows the formula to a tee. Max still takes on hordes of heavily armed baddies with akimbo pistols and copious amounts of slow-motion dodges. There's still plenty of cheesy, film noir-style narration, too.

We tested Max Payne 3 at the end of the second chapter, where Max guns down masked kidnappers on the roof of a São Paulo skyscraper. We used the same sequence of bullet-time dodges and surgical headshots each time in order to minimize variability between runs.

Testing was conducted at 1920x1080. Detail settings were maxed out everywhere except for multisampled antialiasing and tessellation. As Scott has pointed out in the past, enabling MSAA disables FXAA in Max Payne 3, and FXAA produces better results with fewer jagged edges here.


Yet again, the GTX 650 Ti AMP! roughly mirrors the GTX 560—except it doesn't display the same see-saw pattern between short and long frame times toward the beginning and end of the run.

Compared to the Radeons, the GTX 650 Ti AMP! card fares much better this time. It's quicker than the Radeon HD 7770, and while its frame latencies are clearly a little higher than those of the 7850 1GB and 7850 2GB Black Edition, the difference is small, and frame-time consistency is excellent.

That 99th-percentile frame time of 18.5 ms works out to 54 FPS, which is pretty close to the 60 Hz refresh rate of most LCD monitors. Sure, the 7850 cards are even faster, but exceeding the display's refresh rate doesn't normally yield palpable benefits.

Our percentile graph shows the GTX 650 Ti AMP! avoids longer frame times in the last 5% or frames, where latencies for the GTX 560 begin to rise. The GTX 650 Ti card's frame times are higher than the Radeons', but they're still quite low throughout.


As for our measure of badness, it shows none of the cards exhibit substantial latency spikes. Our first-hand impressions corroborate this. Max Payne 3 feels silky smooth overall, even on the Radeon HD 7770 Black Edition.