Hi guys,

I just found this out the hard way!

I had a pair of gtx 285 ftw 2gb boards for at least 4 years now and one of them recently failed.

They have a lifetime warranty so I rma'd the dead board and evga sent me a gtx 480 with 1.5gb of mem. I was told that they no longer have any 285 refurbs in stock and that this was an upgrade although I lose 25% memory.

Well I found out it may be an upgrade for game performance but for maya it's really disappointing. I opened a couple medium high poly models and trying to navigate around the scene is just miserable! It lags and rotating the model it jumps in like 30 degree increments!!!

How bad is it? Well I had sent both my 285's back so I put an even older gtx 8800 ultra in my system and I can rotate the same models as fast as I can move the mouse! There is nearly NO lag at all!



After more tinkering I found that one thing that is affecting the performance has to do with two-sided lighting. If I turn two-sided lighting off most of the lag goes away. But two-sided lighting did not affect my 285 in any noticeable way!


I just wanted to report my findings. I am not sure what I am going to do. I cannot afford $3500 for quadro s nor would I waste the money if I could.

evga has offered me two options:

(1) exchange the gtx 480 1.5gb with a gtx 560ti 2GB board but that will not address the driver gimping and although I get back to 2gb of memory I lose gpu cores and gfx performance!

(2) get on a waiting list for a pair of 285 ftw 2gb boards. Which sounds fishy to me. Like they are going to repair some 285's and put me on a list???


So basically I am not sure which way to go. I actually sent them my good 285 just the other day after running a couple 3d benchmarks and opening a couple simple maya models. Turns out the benchmarks are only a gauge of gaming performance and the small models did not reveal the geforce driver gimping.