Nvidia (Zotac) GeForce GTX 285 1GB

Final Thoughts...

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 285 is the fastest single GPU graphics card on the planet, but it will face some tough competition amid the price cuts that have impacted both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards over the festive period. In terms of pricing, the real competition for the GTX 285 comes from the ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 at just under £260 including VAT.

Unfortunately we haven’t fully tested it yet, but it’s something we’re planning to correct over the next week as official drivers now appear to be available for the card through AMD’s website.

At that price, it’s hard to beat but one has to remember that driver support is what feeds that card’s success – in games where the Radeon HD 4870 X2 scales poorly, so will the Radeon HD 4850 X2. And what concerns us more about the card is how long it has taken to get official driver support from AMD – a two month leadtime doesn’t exactly fill us with confidence for the future when new games are released.

That brings us onto a greater point about AMD’s driver strategy – while the one-driver-a-month strategy worked incredibly well when the company was making only single GPU graphics cards, it doesn’t work so well when you throw dual-GPU graphics cards into the mix. Whenever a new game or graphics card comes out, an optimised profile needs to be created – with a one-driver-a-month policy, that can mean a leadtime of up to two months if the release comes at the wrong time in AMD’s driver cycle like it did with the Radeon HD 4850 X2.

On multi-GPU graphics cards that rely on driver profiles to deliver their maximum performance, we feel there is a need to move away from this rigid strategy because it’s now doing more harm than good in our opinion. This would also make the multi-graphics card solutions more viable as well, because the driver support would be more forthcoming when it’s required. Don’t get me wrong though, the monthly updates are nice but only if they don’t get in the way of the game release calendar.

From Nvidia’s side of the fence, the GeForce GTX 280 is the obvious competition and while the GTX 285 is faster, you have to ask if it’s worth the additional outlay over the few GTX 280s that are still available. Obviously, we’ve tested the standard clocked version here, but there’s an XFX GeForce GTX 280 clocked at 640MHz core (not that much lower than the GTX 285’s reference clock) on sale at Scan for £275 including VAT which makes us wonder whether it’s worth spending the extra £20 or so on a 285.

Of course, there are power consumption benefits to the 285, but they’re small. The other thing we haven’t covered is overclocking, but based on our brief experience with overclocking, the 55nm cores seem to clock a little better – the XFX GeForce GTX 280 XT is likely to be close to its clock speed limit out of the factory.

For someone upgrading from an existing GTX 200 series graphics card, there’s no point in looking at the 285 – the performance increase just isn’t there and there are similarities between this launch and the GeForce 8800 Ultra’s launch. This time though, there isn’t a frankly huge price premium for the new model. With that in mind, if you’re upgrading from a GeForce 8-series card, it might be worthwhile considering over the older GeForce GTX 280, but if you wanted a real performance boost, you’ll need to look at the GeForce GTX 295 or Radeon HD 4870 X2.

That puts us in two minds about the GTX 285 – while it does nothing wrong on principle, it doesn’t do a lot to convince us that it wants to be a part of your next build. Simply put, if you want the fastest single GPU graphics card in your next build, the GeForce GTX 285 is it – there are, however, better value and faster graphics cards out there, which means the GeForce GTX 285’s position in the market is a little awkward.

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