Max Payne 3 crashes during intro?

So I've finally finished downloading Max Payne 3 from Steam and now I'm having issues getting it started.

I can launch the game, and I get to the Press Enter screen, I go through the brightness screen, but then when it gets to the intro video I get all kinds of problems.
The intro starts, plays for maybe 3-4 seconds, then it just hangs. If I leave the computer for about 30 seconds, it starts crashing to desktop but never quite manages it, so I have to hold down the power button and totally power down the laptop.
I googled the issue and it seems to be fairly common, and I've tried the following fixes to no avail,
Updated my drivers. Was on ATi 12.4 drivers, now on 12.6, no difference whatsoever.
Verified the Steam cache.
Started the game, Alt-Tabbed out and set the core affinity to only 0 and 1 rather than all.

I did go into the Catalyst Pro Control Centre and disabled Crossfire, and that did change things slightly. Now the intro video appears for a split second, then it all goes black. However the sound keeps playing in the background. If I press the Esc key, I can hear it pause and a menu open, then if I hit Esc again the intro sound resumes. I haven't tried leaving this to see if the game starts up afterwards, but even if it does it means the cutscenes, a good bit of the game as I understand, are unwatchable. This is also why I haven't tried the other fix I saw of adding a -novid tag to the steam command line for Max Payne 3. I tried to Ctrl+Alt+Del out of the game to quit it, but it crashed to desktop with an error "Game Memory Error. Please restart the game" then froze the entire computer.

Some other suggestions seem to suggest changing the game graphics settings (Disable V-Sync, AA, etc), but I never get any kind of menu to actually alter the settings of the game.

Anybody else got any ideas/suggestions?


For reference, hardware specs.


The graphics cards specific models are 1GB 5870's


I'd really rather avoid trying re-downloading the game. It's 30GB and whilst my parents are on a Virgin 20Mb connection whilst I'm staying with them, it gets throttled down to 5 after downloading so much so the download takes ages since I tend not to leave the laptop on overnight or while I'm at work.


EDIT - Ok, I re-enabled Crossfire and tried one more time. This time as soon as the game started I hit Alt+Enter to take it out of fullscreen mode....and the intro video worked fine, started playing. After 10 seconds I hit Alt+Enter to fullscreen again, kept playing and got me right through to the menu. I played with the settings to up the resolution to 1920x1080, changed a few other settings, restarted the game and it launched fine in fullscreen mode from the start, though the intro video didn't play this time, it just went straight through to the menu, so I'm a little concerned that future cutscenes will suffer the same thing. Only one way to find out, but changing the resolution from the default might help things.

Once you've watched the cut scene first time starting the game it won't play again. Should now go to the press start screen before taking you to the games menu's.

Exactly what I was worried about did happen. Started the game in fullscreen mode, got to the menu, started it, but as soon as it goes from the menu into the actual cutscene, game crashes and hangs my entire PC again. Put it into windowed mode before the cutscene starts though, and it starts playing normally and I can fullscreen it a few seconds into the cutscene. Get to the end of the first chapter however and when it tries to go into a cutscene (an actual cut scene rather than the scenes that seem to just be auto-control of the game engine) and it hangs again.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1439

You could see if there's any solutions there.

Didn't see anybody on there with quite the specific issue I had (and still waiting for approval before I can post a thread of my own ) but I did see a couple of people mentioning similar issues, so I tried the fix of changing the DirectX from 11 to 10.1. This has worked and cutscenes now work in full screen from the start.

This isn't ideal however, as without DirectX 11 some of the graphics options are disabled. I suppose I could force some of the options through Catalyst Control but it's still not ideal. Still, it is better than playing it in Windowed mode I'll admit.
I have run the DirectX runtime and it says I have the latest version already installed, and since DirectX11 is built into Windows 7 I can't remove and reinstall it....


Can DirectX11 be at least repaired/reinstalled within Windows 7?
I suppose I could use this as an excuse for a long overdue Windows reinstall, but right now I just can't be bothered with the backing up of everything and faffing about reinstalling everything.



EDIT -
Ok, further trial and error has finally located the cause of the issue. Turns out changing my DirectX version was a bit of a red herring. What I hadn't noticed was that when I changed from DirectX11 to 10.1, it disabled Vsync. When I went in and turned Vsync on, cutscenes were freezing again in fullscreen mode. So, I switched back to DirectX11, but this time kept Vsync off, and it's working.
I'm going to try forcing Vsync through the drivers instead and if this works then I suppose, for now at least, the problem is 'solved'.

I've got a link to another forum on my laptop at home (saved it when I had problems with Max Payne 3 on release, my issue was solved with updates though) will forward it on to you when I get home (might have something to do with ATi cards.

KjGarly wrote:I've got a link to another forum on my laptop at home (saved it when I had problems with Max Payne 3 on release, my issue was solved with updates though) will forward it on to you when I get home (might have something to do with ATi cards.

Thanks

I've tried forcing Vsync through the ATi driver control panel, but this doesn't seem to work. Looking around it seems a lot of other people are having Vsync issues in DirectX11 and 10 modes, only 9c seems to be working right.

Beginning to think for my next computer I should go back to Nvidia

I know this is a year later, but turning off VSync worked for my Nvidia.

So many games have issues with v-sync. usually better to enable through graphics control panel or use a program like D3DOverider.