Overview
TL;DR – For me, it helped removing “Gaming Services” from my PC. Many users have reported that Max Payne 3 randomly pauses every few seconds.Instead of fixing their bad code, Rockstar recommends a bunch workarounds that didn’t work out for me:https://support.rockstargames.com/de/articles/200152866/Pausing-to-the-Pause-screen-randomly-in-Max-Payne-3-for-PCLike other Rockstar games, Max Payne 3 checks if your input device is still pluged in.But unlike the other R* Titles, this game also checks for more than just the input devices.This means that a faulty device could cause your game to pause, even if it’s not an USB-Device.If this happens to you, do the following steps:First you have to find out what is causing the bug. Open the Windows Event Viewer:[ ⊞ Win ] + [ R ] type eventvwr Start the game and wait for the next pause. After the bug occurs, immediately [ Alt ] + [ Tab ] out and check the Logs under Windows Logs > System .In my case, this was the warning: Disk 9 has been surprise removed. (If you have a different warning, try to find out which device causes the issue and disable it in the Device Manager.)So my PC only has 5 physical hard drives.After a bit of research it turned out, that Disk 9 is a virtual “xvd disk”, which is used by Microsoft for the Game Pass and the Gaming Services.I tried disabling all Microsoft Gaming Services but that didn’t help. The only fix was to uninstall the Gaming Services.This can’t be done via the settings menu, but with a PowerShell command:https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-windows_store/gamingservices-and-gamingservicesnet/04e2fc02-ff76-444b-8ed3-d03a8bd55e3cPlease let me know if it helped, or if you’ve found a better way to fix this.