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- Date:
- Thursday , January 15, 2009
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition
NVIDIA is launching the GeForce GTX 285 which is a refreshed GTX 280. We take a look at EVGA’s GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition with some insanely high clock speeds. Higher clocks hopefully mean better performance, and we see what kind of gameplay experience is delivered compared to the older GeForce GTX 280.
Crysis: Warhead
We are using the full version of Crysis: Warhead. We will be playing Warhead with the default APIs for our system, which launches automatically in DX10 mode with the 32-bit executable. We are playing the entire “Train” level. Our run-through starts off with us getting on the train, manning the gun turrets, and blowing up everything along the way as the train progresses down the tracks. We stop at the tower, perform the mission there, and continue on until the end. This run-through consists of explosions, shader effects, dense swamp and foliage, gun fire, enemy combat, and oh did we say explosions?
Highest Playable Settings
Crysis: Warhead was a mix of gameplay experiences across all three video cards tested here. We have the Radeon HD 4870 X2 included in all gameplay evaluation today due to the current reduction in prices now competing with the price point of the EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition. It is clear though that this dual-GPU video card with its much higher shader performance is able to perform very well in this game which is very shader intensive. We were able to run with the game with everything on “Enthusiast” on the Radeon HD 4870 X2.
While the EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC edition was not playable with everything on “Enthusiast” at 1920x1200 it did manage to have several of the settings at “Enthusiast” with the rest at “Gamer.” We were able to take textures up to “Enthusiast” as well as physics, volumetrics, post processing, water, and motion blur. We were also able to have 2X AA enabled with all of these settings at “Enthusiast.” These settings are higher than what we were able to achieve with GeForce GTX 280.
With the GeForce GTX 280 we had to set everything in the game to “Gamer” quality levels. We were also not able to use AA with any decent level of performance. This means the EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition enjoys several gameplay advantages by having AA enabled, higher texture quality, physics, volumetrics, post processing, water and motion blur. Ultimately the Radeon HD 4870 X2 provided the best gameplay experience in this game, but the EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition was much closer to it than the GeForce GTX 280 was.