Zotac GeForce GTX285 AMP Edition 1024MB GDDR3 Review :: Features

• 702MHz core clock
• 240 stream processors
• 2592MHz memory clock
• 1GB GDDR3 memory
• 512-bit memory bus
• DirectX 10.0
• OpenGL 2.1
• PhysX
• CUDA
• PureVideo
• 165.9GB/second memory bandwidth
• 32 ROPs
• 80 TMUs
• 22.5 Gigapixel Fill rate
• 51.4 Gigatexel fill rate
• SLI technology
• Firestorm

The ZOTAC card is based upon NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285 chip which is a higher clocked version of the GeForce GTX 280. The card has 240 Stream Processors, 1.4 Billion transistors and is based upon TSMC's 55nm manufacturing process. The core speed of the ZOTAC card is 702MHz, which is higher than the reference clock of 648MHz. The Shader clock is clocked at 1512MHz instead of the reference 1476 and the memory clock is set at 2592 instead of 2484.

GeForce GTX 285 cards have 1GB of GDDR3 memory. ZOTAC's card has a memory clock of 2592MHz which gives a memory bandwidth of 165.9GB/second. The card has 32 ROPs which means it has a pixel fillrate of 22.5 Gigapixels per second. There are also 80 Texturing units, meaning the textel fill rate is 51.4 Gigatexels/second.

NVIDIA's cards all support DirectX 10.0 features like Pixel Shader 4.0 and Vertex Shader 4.0. NVIDIA was one of the first video chip companies to have support for OpenGL 3.0 in their drivers. NVIDIA does not as of yet support DirectX 10.1 but will support it once DirectX 11 cards come from them as DX11 requires support for 10.1 and below features.

Ageia developed PhysX as both a hardware and software solution for doing realistic physics in a game. They released an Ageia PhysX accelerator before being purchased by NVIDIA. Today virtually every NVIDIA based video card supports PhysX effects in games. Games like Unreal Tournament 3, Sacred 2, Mirror's Edge and many games that are upcoming use PhysX to good effect. Realistic particle systems, realistic smoke and fog and destructible environments are just some of the effects that PhysX can do.

ZOTAC has developed an overclocking utility called Firestorm for use with their NVIDIA based video cards. Firestorm operates much like NVIDIA's Performance tuning software giving the user control over clock speeds, Shader clocks, Memory clocks and temperatures. ZOTAC's Firestorm also has manual fan-speed control for the card. The utility can load overclocking settings at startup, and has a built-in fail-safe if the overclocking fails. System requirements are GeForce 8, 9, GTX seriesor higher, Windows XP, Vista, 32-bit or 64-bit and NVIDIA Forceware 180 drivers or newer.