Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

Max Payne 2 graphics engine uses pixel shaders 1.1, 1.4 and vertex shaders 1.1. All DirectX9 compatible graphics cards together with RADEON 9200 will process shader version 1.4, and GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x only shader version 1.1, because it doesn’t support shaders version 1.4 at all.

Here ATI based graphics cards appear a bit faster than NVIDIA based solutions. The biggest performance gain during overclocking is as usual observed by NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 LE and ATI RADEON 9600.

The behavior of GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x is really remarkable: while RADEON 9200 runs fast though not outstanding, Ti4200-8x defeats all other graphics cards completely! It probably owes these results to the absence of pixel shaders version 1.4 support, which allows this solution to follow a simpler way.

You can also see it from the screenshots below. Max’ leather jacket as displayed by a GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x based system lost sheen and glare, and the faces and skin of the characters lost something like a side lightning, which made them look mode realistic. The two screenshots below are obtained on RADEON 9200 (top) and GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x (bottom). Take a look:

ATI RADEON 9200

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200

When we enable FSAA and AF, the situation remains generally the same, though the oldies give up their positions immediately. GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x runs as fast as GeForce FX 5700, while RADEON 9200 falls even behind GeForce FX 5200 because of the extremely resource-hungry super-sampling algorithm it uses in case of enabled FSAA.