nVidia GTX285 Bottleneck Investigation

Commentary

Starting with Call of Duty 5, we see the game’s massive reliance on the core clock, with or without AA. The shader clock is the next most important without AA, while it’s the memory with 4xAA.

Moving on to Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, we see the core making the biggest performance impact with no AA. When 4xAA is applied however, all three clocks are quite close, with memory being slightly more important than the others. It’s also interesting that the shader clock has a bigger impact with 4xAA compared to no AA. Generally the reverse applies in most games.

In Crysis Warhead we see the core clock being the most important, with or without AA. We also see the shader clock having a slightly bigger impact when 4xAA is enabled compared to 0xAA, which is what we saw in Call of Juarez.

And finally in Far Cry 2, we see meaningful results because of utilizing a better benchmark this time around. The core is the most important with memory ranking second, especially when 4xAA is applied.

Conclusion

Unlike the GTX260+, the GTX285 closely mimics the 8800 Ultra’s results, with the core clock showing about twice the performance impact of the other clocks in this set of benchmarks.

So if you’re overclocking your GTX285, try to get the core clock as high as possible as you’ll likely see the most performance benefit.

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