OK listen up. Or read up, take your pick. Here is the point where on bit-tech.net you'll see all pretty little graphs comparing the card to others, and JIGGAWATTS:FPS ratios and stuff like that.

Yeah, you won't get that here.

First impressions: Booted up Killing Floor, zombie killing fest best ont he UT2k4 engine, so this card, like my old 8800 GTX SLi, should eat it up.

Not so. I was seeing large dips in framerate, and the bloom lighting was going crazy. Hm, not a good start. I did a total driver reinstall (again) and boom, problem sorted.

You are probably thinking "yeah... but can it run crysis?!" We'll come back to that.

Next up, TF2. My current favourite game to play online. If you haven't playing it, you seriously suck. Based on the Orange Box Source engine, it has HDR and lots of fancy shaders for the graphics card to chomp through. So, how well does it compare to my old setup?

Awesome. The single card performed very well, and I prefer it to the SLi setup - so many issues with SLi causing performance drops or glitches. I have heard a few comments from some of my fellow winners that they have had a few issues with the card - I have noticed that most games will load slower at first, for example Left4Dead. I think it's because this card might handle shaders differently to their previous cards, so the game has to sort them out - similar to when you change the resolution in Battlefield 2. However, this is just a guess, and the slowdown seems to be temporary.

This is the sort of shenanigans SLi can pull on you - Streched Face Syndrome. House told me so.

With the 285, you can make spies cower in fear and attempt to disguise as a bench.

Now I know what you are thinking "that great... BUT CAN IT RUN CRYSIS!"

And the answer to that is... probably. I don't have it installed, and I'm not installing it just to answer the question. It probably will. And will look very shiny. This card will handle almost anything you throw at it. However, it is worth noting that when under heavy load (ie OMG RED LOGO ON THE SIDE) it can get very noisey - easily louder than my 2 8800 GTX's under load. Decent headphones are the answer here. This is a blisteringly fast card, I highly recommend it if you support the Green Team.

The GTX285 will help you crit when you need it most, kerploding all the blu team who about to cap. MAGGOTS!*

 *Results may vary