> While Max Payne was cutting-edge, a lot of what made the visuals appear impressive was due to hand-tweaking by a team of highly skilled artists and designers, who were probably using ridiculously primitive tooling

And let's not forget what while the game was released in summer of 2001 - it was in a development for the almost five years, with the first demos at '98 E3. There is a lot of things what were not even available in 1997 (Voodoo just released) and in 2001 there was already GeForce 3.