Max Payne was a cutting-edge game that received numerous industry awards during 2001. Based on DirectX 8, Max Payne was developed with Remedy Entertainment's MAX-FX Technology. Since its inception during the DirectX 6 era, MAX-FX has evolved into a state-of-the-art 3D rendering development platform that takes full advantage of the latest graphics hardware.

Max Payne contains a number of configuration settings that can be customized in order to achieve good performance on low-end systems. In addition to the main graphics options, there are additional options that can be individually configured to a low, medium, or high setting.

Max Payne Options

The following settings were automatically selected by the game and are based on the capabilties of the processor, memory, and graphics subsystem.

Max Payne Default Configuration
Setting	Value
Video Mode	1024x768
Color Depth	32-Bit
Filtering Mode	Bilinear
Texture Color Depth	16-Bit
Antialiasing	Off
Fogging	Enabled
Sounds	Enabled
Screen Buffers	Triple
Additional Options	High

Performance was measured using the same partial walkthrough of the Roscoe Street Station I conducted in a review of Prolink's GeForce3 Ti 200 in January of 2002. As with Dungeon Siege, the results are in order by highest to lowest average frame rate. Each benchmark contains the settings that were used during the walkthrough and include resolution, AA, and AF on the first line, followed by the texture filtering method, texture color depth, and additional options on the second line.

Max Payne Performance

Due to the multitude of in-game graphics settings, a variety of configurations can be used in Max Payne that will provide smooth performance. The 800x600 setting with 2X AA was visually pleasing and I'm certain that with a bit more tweaking, its performance can be improved upon.

I conquered Halo on the Xbox and now the game has been conquering personal computers all over the world. Even today's most powerful systems fail to achieve the 60 frames per second benchmark threshold at 1024x768.

Having played the single-player game with a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra at this setting, I seriously doubted that an integrated graphics chipset would be able to handle Halo. However, as I mentioned earlier, certain graphics settings will not available on the GeForce MX due to a lack of hardware support.

Halo Video and Audio Setup

In this case, specular lighting and shadows are unavailabe.

Halo - No Specular Lights

Halo - Specular Lighting

The Halo timedemo was run with high and medium texture quality, shadows disabled, specular lighting disabled, decals disabled, particles off, and sound disabled. The fixed function shader path was automatically selected by Halo.

Halo Performance

The results indicate that a resolution of 640x480 will be the best option to play Halo using an integrated GeForce4 MX. I rolled up my sleeves, configured the game as follows, and proceeed to play the first level and part of the second level.

Halo Video and Audio Setup

I took a few screenshots along the way.

Halo Gameplay Screenshots

The image quality may not be glamarous, but I ended up with an average frame rate of 50 and a minimum frame rate of 24.

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