Sparkle GeForce GTX 650 Ti Dragon Series review

Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3 features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay. Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable.

In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail. New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession.

With only 1GB of GDDR5 these settings exceed the onboard memory, and the game engine highlights the problem in red at the bottom.

Again these high settings prove too demanding for the Sparkle GeForce GTX 650 Ti Dragon Series, dropping to an average of 25 frames per second and dropping below 20 frames per second on a regular basis.

We dropped the image quality settings to place a lesser load on the GPU, totaling 924MB memory utilisation.

The modest reduction in image quality settings help smooth out the frame rate, increasing to an average of 35 frames per second and holding above 25 frames per second at all times.

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