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Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

Since our review of the FX5950 we started adding new benchmarks to our test suite. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne was released just this month so it makes a decent benchmark. While the game is a DX8 title, it's graphics quality is quite high and its recent release qualifies it as a "current" title. The game actually runs with decent framerates even on very low end hardware, so for our testing purposes we set all features to HIGH and also turned on all the graphics features made available from the start screen. You can see a shot of our settings below:

Originally we intended on running at 1600x1200 with 2XAA and also at 1280x1024 with 4XAA settings, however the Nvidia cards would not load the game properly at 1600x1200 with any Anti-Aliasing enabled at all, so we opted to drop that test. At 1280x1024 with all features (including high post-processing and anisotropic filtering) the game looks very good... however when you push it up to 1600x1200 with 2XAA on the ATI cards the game really looks gorgeous, and framerates are still just playable for the most part. The game literally shines on a 9800 or 5900 class card with 1600x1200 and 4XAA or above.

To benchmark Max Payne 2 we used FRAPs and did a manual run through of a level. We chose a level in which there is both indoor fighting and an outdoor scene. The fighting is very limited and can be repeated roughly the same - there are 2 enemies in 2 locations during the runthrough, and we can easily mow through them using bullet-time. To get our scores we trained ourselves to be able to complete the runthrough such that each run was within 0.5-1.5 FPS of each other, and then we averaged the FPS measured in 3 runs for each card. Also note that by default the pixel shader setting is disabled by the game, so we opted to show results with pixel shader 1.4 enabled and disabled.

The FX5700 Ultra here has some fairly disappointing scores, as it lags behind the ATi cards in every way possible. With pixel shader on, the scores are considerably lower, which shows that the FX5700 is very inefficient when handling the Max Payne code.

Comanche 4

Without AA and AF turned on, there is generally little to no difference in the benchmark scores between the FX5700 and the 9600 XT.

Here we see that when AA and AF are turned on, the FX5700 Ultra handily beats the Radeon 9600XT, whereas the older FX5600 Ultra matches up fairly close to it.