EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition

Date: March 1, 2009 - Author: Rob Williams

When NVIDIA released their GTX 285 card last month, it became the fastest single-GPU card on the market, and that fact still remains. But with our insatiable appetite for more performance, we can't help but be curious as to how the cards perform when overclocked. So let's check that out, with the help of EVGA's SSC Edition.

Introduction

Where high-end cards are concerned, there hasn't been too much action lately, from either ATI or NVIDIA. Last month though, NVIDIA followed-up to their high-end GT200-series launch with two new cards: the single-GPU GTX 285 and the dual-GPU GTX 295. While both became the highest-end cards on the market for their respective category (single vs. dual), neither were architecturally new, but rather evolutionary upgrades.

That's not to discredit NVIDIA's latest offerings though, because both are absolute screamers. The GTX 285 became the fastest single-GPU card available, by a fair margin, and likewise, the GTX 295 did a fine job of schooling ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2 (but to be fair, ATI's offering was available near five months earlier). So where we do stand right now? Well, whether or not you consider it a good thing or not, we're in the same position we were in when we first posted our initial review of NVIDIA's latest cards.

Although neither ATI or NVIDIA have unveiled dates for their upcoming line-ups, what the near-future holds is a few new mid-range cards from NVIDIA, and another high-end single-GPU card from ATI. In the coming weeks, we'll be seeing the GTS 250 from NVIDIA, which replaces the 9800 GTX+, and sometime in April, we should be seeing an HD 4890 single-GPU card from ATI, which isn't likely to match the GTX 285's performance, but it may match the GTX 280.

Unless ATI or NVIDIA decide to release new high-end cards we're unaware of, right now is a great time to consider a new build, because it doesn't look like either company is going to cause anyone to kick themselves a month from now. NVIDIA is the one right now who dominates the high-end, so despite their current battles with other things GPU and non-GPU, their offerings still pack a serious punch, pricing aside.

Closer Look at EVGA's GTX 285 SSC Edition

In our GTX 285/GTX 295 launch article, I concluded with obvious sentiments. Both cards were fantastic performers, but were not for everyone. I firmly believe that both the GTX 285 and GTX 295 are designed exclusively for the 30" monitor crowd, although those with 24" can still benefit if anti-aliasing is important (but most games where AA would be nice to see, are just too overwhelming for any GPU configuration right now, such as Crysis Warhead). That's not to say that there won't be performance increases in games at 1920x1200 or even lower, but at those resolutions, the average reported FPS is going to be quite good to begin with, so differences you'll actually notice in real gameplay may not even be noticeable (when comparing, say, a GTX 260/216 vs. GTX 280).

That's one point I feel I need to stress, because without at least a 24" monitor, you are going to be wasting your GPU (and more importantly, your money). To me, the absolute minimum resolution for the GTX 285 is 1920x1200, and even then, like I mentioned, you may not even notice a difference between it, and a GTX 260/216, depending on the game. Your wallet will see a difference though, of well over $100 (~$130 currently at quick glance). You might notice that I'm not talking about the in-between GTX 280, and the reason is simple... it's expensive. Since the GTX 285 launched, the GTX 280 hasn't decreased in price much, if at all, and retails almost the same as a GTX 285. So, it's really just a waste of space on our favorite e-tailers listings page.

To recap, a GTX 285 is for those who use 1920x1200 resolutions and above, and want the best performance currently available from a single-GPU solution. The added PhysX benefit may add to the appeal as well though. Although we don't have intense reason to care much about it right now (given only Mirror's Edge puts it to any good use), NVIDIA has recently solidified relationships with a few key developers that should give us more reason to show interest later this year.

As a quick refresher, the GTX 285 is an upgraded GTX 280. Its clocks are higher all-around, although its internal specifications, such as number of processors and memory density, remain intact. The GTX 295, on the other hand, is NVIDIA's highest-end card currently, and features two GPUs on one card - essentially an SLI solution that takes up less space. It's not as fast as the GTX 285 when it comes to games that don't take full advantage of SLI, but those that do, it doesn't stand a chance. That's fine though, as the GTX 295 costs a little over $170 more.

The card we're taking a look at today isn't an ordinary GTX 285, though. Rather, it's clocked higher than reference, and by a fair margin. The reference card as seen in the table above is 648MHz Core, 1476MHz Shader and 1242MHz Memory, while this "SSC" edition bumps those to 702MHz Core, 1584MHz Shader and 1323MHz Memory. At those clocks, EVGA's SSC is one of the fastest models on the market, only succeeded by the company's own FTW (For The Win) version of the card.

As you can see below, the SSC Edition is no different looking than the reference design, aside from the sticker used. Four out of the EVGA's five GTX 285 models currently use the same sticker, which can make it a bit difficult to differentiate them all. It's important to double-check the model codes before you place your order, although the pricing differences are probably going to be enough.

Also like the reference card, the SSC Edition features dual DVI-D ports and also an S-Video. This card is also special in that Tri-SLI is supported, if you really want to go ultra-high-end. I don't immediately recommend that route, however, as it's a very, very expensive one, even if you pick the cheapest models (~$1,000).

One nice benefit the GTX 285 has over the GTX 280, aside from the obvious performance boost, is the dual 6-Pin PCI-E connector requirement. Since the GTX 280 was built on a larger process (65nm), a single 8-Pin PCI-E connector was required alongside the typical 6-Pin one. In addition, because of the process shrink, both temperatures and power draw are slightly improved... both sweet bonuses.

Since this card has been out for over a month, there's not much that can be said now that you don't likely already know. If you do happen to want to know more, then you may want to check out our launch article from last month, which takes a slightly deeper look at both the GTX 285 and GTX 295.

Now that we have all that taken care of, let's move right into a look at our testing methodology, and then get things started with Call of Duty: World at War.

Test System & Methodology

At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing.

If there is a bit of information that we've omitted, or you wish to offer thoughts or suggest changes, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail or post in our forums.

Test System

The below table lists our testing machine's hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used. Each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective review of that product, or if a review doesn't exist, it will bring you to the product on the manufacturer's website.

When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines:

General Guidelines
• No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS.
• Internet is disabled.
• No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed.
• The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs.
• Hard drives affected are defragged with Diskeeper 2008 prior to a fresh benchmarking run.
• Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less.

Windows Vista Optimizations
• User Account Control (UAC) and screen saver are disabled.
• Windows Defender, Firewall, Security Center, Search, Sidebar and Updates are disabled.

To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows Vista from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like.

Game Benchmarks

For graphic card reviews that pit us with a mid-range card or higher, we test at three popular resolutions that span the mid-range to high-end ground, consisting of monitor sizes of 20" (1680x1050), 24" (1920x1200) and 30" (2560x1600).

In an attempt to offer "real-world" results, we do not utilize timedemos in our graphic card reviews, with the exception of Futuremark's automated 3DMark Vantage. Each game in our test suite is benchmarked manually, with the minimum and average frames-per-second (FPS) captured with the help of FRAPS 2.9.5.

To deliver the best overall results, each title we use is exhaustively explored in order to find the best possible level in terms of intensiveness and replayability. Once a level is chosen, we play through repeatedly to find the best possible route and then in our official benchmarking, we stick to that route as close as possible. Since we are not robots and the game can throw in minor twists with each run, no run can be identical to the pixel.

Each game and setting combination is tested twice, and if there is a discrepancy between the initial results, the testing is repeated until we see results we are confident with.

The six games we currently use for our GPU reviews are listed below, with direct screenshots of the game's setting screens and explanations of why we chose what we did.

Crysis Warhead

1680x1050	1920x1200	2560x1600

Call of Duty: World at War

1680x1050	1920x1200	2560x1600

Far Cry 2

1680x1050	1920x1200	2560x1600

Left 4 Dead

1680x1050	1920x1200	2560x1600

Mirror's Edge

1680x1050	1920x1200	2560x1600

Need for Speed: Undercover

1680x1050	1920x1200	2560x1600

Call of Duty: World at War

While some popular game franchises are struggling to keep themselves healthy, Call of Duty doesn't have much to worry about. This is Treyarch's third go at a game in the series, and a first for one that's featured on the PC. All worries leading up to this title were all for naught, though, as Treyarch delivered on all promises.

To help keep things fresh, CoD: World at War focuses on battles not exhaustively explored in previous WWII-inspired games. These include battles which take place in the Pacific region, Russia and Berlin, and variety is definitely something this game pulls off well, so it's unlikely you'll be off your toes until the end of the game.

For our testing, we use a level called "Relentless", as it's easily one of the most intensive levels in the game. It features tanks, a large forest environment and even a few explosions. This level depicts the Battle of Peleliu, where American soldiers advance to capture an airstrip from the Japanese. It's a level that's both exciting to play and one that can bring even high-end systems to their knees.

We're off to a great start here, with noticeable performance increases over both the reference GTX 285 and also Zotac's pre-overclocked AMP! edition card. The differences are still rather small and unnoticeable in regular gameplay, however, and that's to be expected. In our 2560x1600 test, the performance shown against the GTX 295 is quite interesting. The GTX 285 SSC performs about 33% less, but still offers just enough FPS to have completely smooth gameplay at the game's max settings. Greater differences may be seen if CoD allowed higher anti-aliasing modes, but that's not the case (higher modes can't even be forced).

Even the reference GTX 285 is beefy enough to allow maximum detail settings at 2560x1600, so basically, the faster your GTX 285, the slightly higher the average FPS. It's a good feeling to be able to totally max out a game and still have absolutely smooth gameplay.

Crysis Warhead

As PC enthusiasts, we tend to be drawn to games that offer spectacular graphics... titles that help reaffirm your belief that shelling out lots of cash for that high-end monitor and PC was well worth it. But it's rare when a game comes along that is so visually-demanding, it's unable to run fully maxed out on even the highest-end systems on the market. In the case of the original Crysis, it's easy to see that's what Crytek was going for.

Funny enough, even though Crysis was released close to a year ago, the game today still has difficulty running at 2560x1600 with full detail settings - and that's even with overlooking the use of anti-aliasing! Luckily, Warhead is better optimized and will run smoother on almost any GPU, despite looking just as gorgeous as its predecessor, as you can see in the screenshot below.

The game includes four basic profiles to help you adjust the settings based on how good your system is. These include Entry, Mainstream, Gamer and Enthusiast - the latter of which is for the biggest of systems out there, unless you have a sweet graphics card and are only running 1680x1050. We run our tests at the Gamer setting as it's very demanding on any current GPU and is a proper baseline of the level of detail that hardcore gamers would demand from the game.

At both our 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 resolutions, the SSC Edition card was able to deliver an excellent gameplay experience, but the hardcore resolution of 2560x1600 proved a bit too much. I admit though, even though we only received 28.177 FPS at that resolution, the game remained quite playable, but was faltered with occasional lag spikes.

Like the rest of our GTX 285 cards, our best playable setting was to retain our 2560x1600 resolution, but also lower our profile to Mainstream. It sucks to decrease anything with a $300+ GPU, but luckily, Crysis still looks quite amazing even with that detail setting, and in some cases, some people might even think it looks better (the "Gamer" profile makes everything darker, while "Mainstream" makes it much easier to see in the distance).

Far Cry 2

Sequels are common, and three of our six games used here prove it. But what's different with Far Cry 2, though, is that while the other sequels here don't throw you for a loop when you first load it up and generally give you what you'd expect to see, this game does the absolute opposite. We knew for months that Far Cry 2 wasn't going to be a direct continuation of the original, but for the most part, this game could have gone by any other name and no one would even make a connection. Luckily for Ubisoft, though, the game can still be great fun.

Like the original, this game is a first-person shooter that offers open-ended gameplay, similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You'll be able to roam the huge map (50km^2) of a central African state which will mostly be traversed by vehicle, as walking even 2% in any direction gets very tedious after a while. This game is a perfect GPU benchmark simply because the graphics are better than the average, with huge draw distances, realistic nature and even a slew of animals to pass by (and kill if you are evil enough).

Our run through takes place in the Shwasana region, and consists of leaving a small hut and walking towards four people prepared to kill me for no apparent reason (except that this is a game). After the opponents are eliminated, a walk along the dirt road continues for another twenty seconds until we reach a small hut with supplies.

Not one to screw with tradition, the SSC card continued to perform slightly better than Zotac's AMP! card, but a fair bit better than the reference. The card's strengths can be exhibited even further by comparing it to the GTX 280 reference card in our chart... the differences are quite substantial.

Once again, EVGA's card was "best playable" at our maximum tested settings of 4xAA and 2560x1600. Moving up to 8xAA proved too much for the card, and it's no surprise given that to date, we've only been able to hit that reliably with two of GTX 285's in SLI mode.

Left 4 Dead

Not too many game publishers can brag about having such a great track record like Valve can. None of their major game releases have ever been released to anything but praise, which goes to show that not rushing to release a game to please investors can make a huge difference. Take Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, for example.

Left 4 Dead is one game I didn't take seriously up until its launch. After playing it though, my opinions changed drastically, and even as I type this, I feel like saving the document and going to play. But, I'm also scared of Zombies, so continue writing I shall. Like Dead Space, this game is a survival shooter, but unlike that game, this title focuses completely on co-op. For the most part, the game is dulled in single player, but team up with three of your friends and let the laughs and excitement begin.

The portion of the level we use for testing is contained within the No Mercy campaign. The ultimate goal in the entire campaign is to make it to the top of a hospital in order to be picked up and brought off to safety. Our run through takes place in the final part of the the campaign, which leads up towards the roof tops. If one thing can be said about this title, it's that causing a Boomer to explode (as seen in the above screenshot) proves to be one of the most satisfying things to do in any game I've played in a while.

Valve's releasing of games that both look great and run well on most machines is nothing new, with Left 4 Dead being the latest in their collection to be able to brag about such a thing. That said, it doesn't take a massive card to power this game, so the GTX 285 of course cleans house.

One oddity I noticed during testing was that the 1680 and 1920 resolution results are much improved over what we experienced with the GTX 285 cards in our launch article. This goes far beyond the simple clock increase. I'm unsure of why there were huge increases this time around, but I'm lead to believe it was thanks to an update the game recently received, since backtracking to the same drivers we used for that article gave near-identical results.

Thanks to the recent boost in performance from the game (however it happened), the SSC edition pushed quite close to the GTX 295 with 8xMSAA at 2560x1600. In reality though, few are going to notice any real increase in performance over 60 FPS. That's a good thing... pretty-much any mid-range card right now will offer enough performance to play one of the hottest games at its highest settings.

Mirror's Edge

What was the last first-person game on the PC to truly blow you away, or offer some unique gameplay experience? New first-person shooters come out quite often, and while some show off some new features and gameplay twists, few of them truly regenerate the genre like we'd hope. Mirror's Edge is a title that strived to do just that, and for the most part, I'd have to say they've done a great job.

First and foremost, Mirror's Edge isn't so much a first-person shooter as it is a first-person adventure game, because for the most part, combat isn't the main focus. Throughout some of the few levels I played through, at times there could be a full ten-minute span without even seeing a single person, which is actually somewhat refreshing. The game focuses on figuring out the best way to get from point A to point B, heavily utilizing the parkour style of travel.

Most levels in Mirror's Edge offers a similar level of system-intensity, so I based our choice on one that was fun to play through, and one that allowed an easily-replicable run-through. It takes place in chapter six, "Pirandello Kruger", and Checkpoint A. We begin in a large building, behind a window, looking out at the city. Our run-through takes us outside of this building, down to the street and up to the top of the building shown to the right in the above screenshot.

Yet again, our EVGA's card delivered great performance at all resolutions. Even our highest 2560x1600 could be enjoyed in just over 60 FPS. How do things change once PhysX is introduced?

Mirror's Edge - PhysX Testing

If there's one title that's been burned in editor's brains over the course of the past few months, it's this one. NVIDIA has been quite proactive in making sure we know how great the game is, and with its heavy use of PhysX, it's not hard to understand why they believe that. Luckily though, as I mentioned above, the game is actually quite fun, and unique, so I think it deserves to be pushed a little bit.

Since Mirror's Edge is really the first commercial game to feature PhysX use throughout, I thought it'd be appropriate to test each card with the technology enabled, since it's generally going to be something that people would want. Bear in mind, though, that ATI cards are automatic losers, simply because they are unable to accelerate PhysX on the GPU like NVIDIA's cards can. For that reason, their cards are going to be unable to handle PhysX computation reliably at any resolution, regardless of the CPU. Using the old-school PhysX dedicated card would rid this problem, however.

Interestingly enough, the FPS drop at 2560x1600 is quite minor compared to the others, but all three still offer more than enough performance for silky-smooth gameplay.

In our above graphs, we saw that 4xAA was more than possible at all resolutions, and things don't at all change with 8xAA. With that, we still managed to see 50+ FPS. Note that this is without PhysX, but even with it, we'd still have good frame rates. The game feels much smoother with it disabled at that resolution, however.

Need for Speed: Undercover

The Need for Speed series is one that remains close to my heart, as I've been played through each title since the release of the second title. Although the series has taken some strange turns most recently, the series still manages to deliver a great arcade-like experience that can be enjoyed by NFS die-hards and casual gamers alike. Sadly, more serious racing fans have had to look elsewhere lately, so hopefully the next NFS incarnation will finally perfect what fans are really looking for.

While ProStreet diverted from the usual "open-world" design, Undercover returned to it. Also returning are police cars, a favorite of most fans. I'm a firm believer that most NFS titles should include police chases, and for the most part, they're executed well in Undercover. There's not too much that exists in this world that proves more frustrating than running over a spike strip after a clean 30-minute run, though.

For all of our tests, the graphics settings available are maxed out to their highest ability, with 4xAA being our chosen Anti-Aliasing setting.

This game in particular must love NVIDIA cards, and the reasons why are evident above. Thanks to the SSC Edition's high clocks, it managed to dominate each and every graph... even beating out NVIDIA's own dual-GPU GTX 295 (thanks to some odd unknown (to me) bug).

As mentioned in my previous GPU reviews, our monitor (Gateway XHD3000) has had an issue with 2560x1600 with particular games (Dead Space, NFS: Undercover), so up until now, we've been unable to run this game at that resolution, hence the absolute lack of results. NVIDIA last week gave me an alpha driver that fixed the issue, however, which is why I was able to test that resolution here. Our 2560x1600 test here was the only game to be tested with that driver. I decided to use it here only because I could, and to show the differences between this card and the other ATI cards we've tested with in the past. Once the driver is deemed stable by NVIDIA, I'll update the entire graph.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

Although we generally shun automated gaming benchmarks, we do like to run at least one to see how our GPUs scale when used in a 'timedemo'-type scenario. Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage is without question the best such test on the market, and it's a joy to use, and watch. The folks at Futuremark are experts in what they do, and they really know how to push that hardware of yours to its limit.

The company first started out as MadOnion and released a GPU-benchmarking tool called XLR8R, which was soon replaced with 3DMark 99. Since that time, we've seen seven different versions of the software, including two major updates (3DMark 99 Max, 3DMark 2001 SE). With each new release, the graphics get better, the capabilities get better and the sudden hit of ambition to get down and dirty with overclocking comes at you fast.

Similar to a real game, 3DMark Vantage offers many configuration options, although many (including us) prefer to stick to the profiles which include Performance, High and Extreme. Depending on which one you choose, the graphic options are tweaked accordingly, as well as the resolution. As you'd expect, the better the profile, the more intensive the test.

Performance is the stock mode that most use when benchmarking, but it only uses a resolution of 1280x1024, which isn't representative of today's gamers. Extreme is more appropriate, as it runs at 1920x1200 and does well to push any single or multi-GPU configuration currently on the market - and will do so for some time to come.

Given the known scalability of 3DMark Vantage, there's absolutely nothing unexpected here.

Final Thoughts

Each time I post a graphics card review, I tend to say the same thing... "It's a great time to buy a GPU", and that's definitely still the case. No matter what GPU you pick up today, the performance is going to be incredibly good, compared to what you would have gotten for the same price just a few years ago. It's quite impressive when you can pick up a $150 GPU nowadays and see it run games at full resolution on a 30" display.

But for those who don't mind spending a little more for added performance, there are still many options available, from high-end single-GPU cards to dual-GPU cards, such as the HD 4870 X2 or GTX 295. As mentioned in the intro though, the top-end of things belongs to NVIDIA at this point in time, with both of their most-recent cards.

Again though, any GTX 285 is going to be wasted on a display of less than 24", because at 1920x1200, the card begins to shine. But as I stated earlier, even a GTX 260/216 may satisfy the appetite for most people with a 1920x1200 resolution, and by taking a look through our graphs here, hopefully you can make your decision based on that.

The GTX 285 in general is a great card. As the fastest single-GPU solution available, it offers great performance, allowing high settings at any resolution available. Plus, thanks to dropping prices, it has become a rather good choice for the best performance currently available with a single card. But what about the SSC Edition from EVGA that we took a look at here today?

As we saw throughout all of our graphs, the SSC card proved to be noticeably faster than the stock-clocked GTX 285, on paper. During real gameplay, it would be very difficult to notice a difference, and that's an important fact to consider. I don't discredit "pre-overclocked" cards, because they certainly have their audience, but to me, it makes much more sense to get a stock-clocked card and enjoy the already-fantastic performance, because really, the differences between the stock and overclocked cards is minimal, as seen in our graphs.

Take note also of the fact that this particular card currently retails for about $60 more than the standard version (EVGA's stock-clocked model is selling for $330 after MIR at one e-tailer), so that's quite a price to pay for such a minor increase in performance. At this card's ~$400 price point, you might as well go the extra mile and just pick up a GTX 295 for $500. If that's not an ideal route, then I recommend simply saving your $60 and sticking with a stock-clocked model. If you need to feel like you have the fastest GTX 285 currently available, nothing stops you from overclocking it yourself.

Regarding overclocking of this card, I omitted reports because I wasn't able to push it much further. The card as it stands is one of the highest-clocked GTX 285's on the market, so it's already at its breaking-point. The max stable clock I managed to hit was an additional 15MHz on the Core and 25MHz on the Shader. Since this GPU is not currently supported by EVGA's own GPU voltage tool, I was unable to test it out to see if it could be pushed further.

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