GeForce GTX 285 review | 3-way SLI

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

Hell's Highway, another WWII shooter some might say. But in reality the setting of war is really just a vehicle for Gearbox to tell the storyline of a Band of Brothers led by you, Sergeant Matt Baker, as they deal with the madness and consequences of war. The game tells the story of Operation Market Garden in the country where yours truly lives, in the Netherlands (aka Holland). It's about the besieged journey from Eindhoven to Arnhem where tremendous battles were fought.

Exactly that road, Highway 69; the road from Eindhoven to Arnhem was later nicknamed: Hell's Highway.

One of the most impressive details is that the area of Operation Market Garden was completely reconstructed using historical documents and images. It's uncanny to see and experience the design of 1944 Holland. Even now in 2009 you can still see striking similarities from our country. Street signs, building structures, clothing and even the clinker bricks on the roads dispense a true authentic mood. This reviewer is Dutch, so what level would be more appropriate than one of the starting levels, in a field in the Netherlands, moving towards a large windmill ahead of us. Lots of geometry is to be found here, and in fact one of the more complex scenes to render for the GPU. Yes, welcome to Holland.

• Texture Quality HIGH
• Shadow Texture Quality HIGH
• Shadow Detail HIGH
• Vsync OFF

Release two months ago and still on top of my list. Again we have all the eye candy enabled in BIA. ATI recently did a lot of optimization in their driver for BIA bringing it close to the GTX 295, it's not enough though. The massive amount of shader performance is something this game really appreciates and that shows.

We notice that the Radeon HD 4870 1024MB is managing fine though has to forfeit on performance once we pass 1600x1200. The Radeon however is 100 bucks cheaper, do keep that in mind. We see roughly a 10% performance benefit among the GTX 280/285.

Here we spot the different brand competing fiercely with each other. They are all really close aren't they ? Still, at this level each rendered frame per second counts, it's what you pay for.  

And once we look into multi-GPU performance we see stumble into the fact of CPU limitation. It's a stage where the GPUs have plenty of headroom to render faster, yet the CPU can't provide it's data enough.

And yes, that's in fact a luxury problem to have ;)