Yes, it’s a better time than ever to be a PC gamer and thanks to NVIDIA’s recently released GPUs, we’re seeing the price-to-performance ratio on today’s mid-to-high-end graphic cards produce frame rates that allow gamers to keep the resolutions high and the detail levels cranked. Most gamers these days are using 22”-24” LCD monitors which mean that the resolutions of 1680x1050 (native to a 22”) and 1920x1200 (native to most 24”) are the two key resolutions we’ll start focusing in on as well as AMD and NVIDIA – they’re obviously going to produce GPUs which can allow gamers to play today’s current games very well at these popular resolutions.

ASUS is amongst the first of several NVIDIA add-in board partners to release a GeForce 285 and 295 – the GPUs which power these cards are nothing more – essentially – than last year’s chips which have been die-shrunk into a smaller package – this means NVIDIA can ratchet up the clock rates, reduce power consumption which ultimately leads to lower heat emissions as well.

Using a 55nm die process, NVIDIA arms this GPU with a core clock of 648MHz, a memory clock at 1242MHz  (2484MHz DDR) and 1GB of on-board memory. The days of 512MB frame buffers are quickly coming to an end as we see games coming out which greatly utilize larger frame buffers.

In addition to this, the 285 can also use NVIDIA’s recently announced GeForce 3D Vision for “stereoscopic gaming” – in my opinion, however, I have yet to see or use any such device that I’d really desire to use.

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