Jan, Before you make a decision I want to say that I had a pair of 285's for years and they worked great up until one failed.

EVGA no longer had 285's and they had lifetime warranties so they replaced them with a pair of 480's and I noticed a significant performance decrease from the 285's. The performance hit was incredibly bad with 2-sided lighting enabled. With the 285's I could regularly work with models that have over 50 million polygons before I started to notice things starting to slow down.

They upgraded the 480's to a pair of 570HD's and I have the same performance reduction. It appears that the 285 product line was the last of the nvidia designs that were based on the quadro architecture. It appears there was even a hack to install quadro drivers on the 8800, 9800, and 285 geforce cards!

The nvidia 480 and above have their own architecture now and are now cobbled beyond just the drivers for use with Maya.

However, that being said with 2-sided lighting off the 570's are tolerable. They also support DX11.

I really want to go with 4GB 680's.

I won't consider firepro (or whatever ati calls there commercial grade card) or quadro as they have terrible directX performance and I do play the occasional game on my system and cannot afford two systems so I can have one geforce and one quadro based machine.

Some stuff to consider....

1. maya does not take advantage of sli
2. maya does take advantage of graphics memory so the more you get the better
3. maya does not take advantage of cuda but there are plenty of other graphics apps that do (which is why I want to get a 680 with 4GB and more then double the cuda cores then the 570 I have now)
4. I personally have had very good luck with nvidia drivers and stability but others can say the same thing about ati so I can't really push one design over another.

I had no problems working with Maya and my nvidia geforce cards until maya 2010 when they switched to the new graphics api (I think it's QT). Since then Maya 2010, 11, 12, and 13 have been a nightmare for me. But I may be dealing with other hardware issues. I am still struggling to get Maya stable.

I just recently had the 570HD replacement card die and I am waiting for it to be replaced in fact. So the struggle for me with Maya continues!