Guys,I am about to upgrade to the 285 and needed some advice and was hoping somebody here owns one of these. The reason I decided to go with BFG Tech is because they have a step up program that allows you to trade in your card within the first 100 days of ownership and step up to the latest card paying the only the difference in cost between the two cards. I contacted their technical support to verify that if I purchased a 285 today, I could trade up to the next gen Nvidia card in the next 100 days. I get the benefit of getting a new card now and seeing how the reviews go with the new nvidia card which is due to be released at the end of the month. Some of you may ask "Why not just wait?". Those of you who are married will understand. :( Also, I decided against purchasing the ATI card for now.SO, here are my choices.http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....%20Technologies

Guys,I am about to upgrade to the 285 and needed some advice and was hoping somebody here owns one of these. The reason I decided to go with BFG Tech is because they have a step up program that allows you to trade in your card within the first 100 days of ownership and step up to the latest card paying the only the difference in cost between the two cards. I contacted their technical support to verify that if I purchased a 285 today, I could trade up to the next gen Nvidia card in the next 100 days. I get the benefit of getting a new card now and seeing how the reviews go with the new nvidia card which is due to be released at the end of the month. Some of you may ask "Why not just wait?". Those of you who are married will understand. :( Also, I decided against purchasing the ATI card for now.SO, here are my choices.http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....%20Technologies

Whatever your choice, you will have no complaints with the GTX285. It's proved on my system to be a great card!Mitch

Why buy a 285 now when the 470 and 480 are out at the end of this month and the 5850 an 5870 are out now?

Why buy a 285 now when the 470 and 480 are out at the end of this month and the 5850 an 5870 are out now?

Step up program with BFG, gotta make a move now before my video card funds are "re-allocated" to something like carpet and there are long threads throughout the forums about image quality and cloud performance on the ATI cards.And a quote from you in another thread made my buying decision on ATI vs Nvidia even easier:"As for GTX 285 vs. HD 5870:bottom line is this: ATi doesn't care about MSFS, and likely never will. "And another one from Mike:

Hi,Just got done reading some of the responses in this topic, what a shame. Its amazing how far down hill these forums have gone since the old days. I've owned both ATI's 5870 and Nvidia's 285GTX video boards, I sold my ATI board on ebay because graphics/performance was unacceptable for use with Microsoft Flight Simulator, Nvidia is the hands-down graphics card of choice for "ME" in regards to Flightsim. If your buying a graphics card in the hopes of better Flightsim drivers, things aren't going to get better drivers wise because both companies could care less about Flight Simulation!. Between the two companies, ATI's drivers are pathetic and any requests/feedback fall on DEAF EARS.As far as re-formating your system and starting from scratch because you changed a video board and associated drivers, that's just ridiculous!. All you need to do is use the graphics card uninstall program provided and if it makes you feel better, use an additional graphics driver removal tool. If you are paranoid about lingering drivers, you could also scan your system registry. Don't let anyone lead you to believe searching the system registry is a long and tedious operation, its not!. If your going to search your system registry just enter key word(s) to search for (example: ATI), if you get a hit, you can leave the entry and continue your search or delete the entry, to continue your search, just press F3 to delete the entry press the DEL key. I can scan and remove ALL VIDEO DRIVERS from my system registry within minutes, a complete system re-install would take two to three days. Again, formatting/complete re-install just for a video board is ridiculous!

ATI = great image quality (better than NVidia) + crappy cloud performance (at least the 4850s and below, can't say for the latest generation. My 4850 flew with clear skies and produced slideshows when overcast. FPS difference was larger than 50%).

Many people that set there systems up properly have reported no cloud problems worse than Nvidia's with the ATi 5 series card. Even my PC with settings above and around ultra high can manage 20-30 FPS in the clouds. Most of the talk are a bunch of rumors by people that don't know how to use the card properly...

Many people that set there systems up properly have reported no cloud problems worse than Nvidia's with the ATi 5 series card. Even my PC with settings above and around ultra high can manage 20-30 FPS in the clouds. Most of the talk are a bunch of rumors by people that don't know how to use the card properly...

Thanks for the feedback guys, I went with this card and will trade up after the GTX4X series has had a little time to bake:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814143172

Scott,Forget about ATI. Stick with Nvidia. Try to find the 2gig version of the gtx 285 or wait a month.If you don't want to wait, the BFG is a great card.

Scott,Forget about ATI. Stick with Nvidia. Try to find the 2gig version of the gtx 285 or wait a month.If you don't want to wait, the BFG is a great card.

I thought about the 2 gig version but there was a thread in this forum a while back and a member who had bought the 2 gig version saw no advantage. He mentioned that they clock the memory slower as well.

It is true that ATi doesn't care about MSFS, but with enough GPU horsepower you can overcome the lack of optimizations in the driver, and that's what a 5850/5870 do for you.

I have a BFG GTX 285OCFU and it runs FSX great!

It is true that ATi doesn't care about MSFS

and Nvidia does? ASUS Rampage II Extreme (1802 BIOS)Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition w/Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme 1366 RTMushkin Redline Ascent 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) (6-7-6-18-1N)Asus/ATI 5870 (Catalyst 10.3 "Preview")Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1tyWD VelociRaptor 150GB

I never said they did, but we all know NV's support for MSFS was superior to ATi's at the point in time when both companies froze their driver code which handles MSFS (months or even years ago).

I never said they did, but we all know NV's support for MSFS was superior to ATi's at the point in time when both companies froze their driver code which handles MSFS (months or even years ago).

From what I remember going back to when FSX was still in beta users have been crying about Nvidia just as much as they have with ATI. ASUS Rampage II Extreme (1802 BIOS)Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition w/Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme 1366 RTMushkin Redline Ascent 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) (6-7-6-18-1N)Asus/ATI 5870 (Catalyst 10.3 "Preview")Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1tyWD VelociRaptor 150GB

That's irrelevant. If the game's not done, drivers won't be optimized for it.