Amy Stork

Bit late to the discussion but I thought I would impart my findings. I've had a GTX280 since Dec 08 running on first gen Pentium i7 920 ( 2.67ghz) - which has worked beautifully until shadows came along. Now when i run with shadows the GTX280 and now overclocked ( to 3.6Ghz ) it *does* work ok just about - in uncrowded areas I get 8-12fps, which is just about playable. Of ourse switch shadows off and I get a jump up to the 40-60's in FPS - and the GPU drops from belting out at 99% to around the 50% mark. To get a better experience with shadows I decided to abandon my faithful old GTX280 and get a new fandangle GTX 560 Ti to give that a road test. Sadly, while it *does* improve frame rate the difference is not massive - in the region of 15-20fps in the same place as before, GPU still maxed at 99%. Switch Ambient occlusion off and I get shadows at a reasonable 25-30fps with the GPU fluctuating between 50-99% - which ain't too shabby - however you really do need AO on to get the most of shadows*. So given that the performance increase with a GTX560ti over a GTX 280 isn't that great I would say it's not worth the upgrade - so I took the GTX 560ti back to the shop and changed it for the GTX 580 instead. What I'm aiming to achieve is a smooth ride with shadows *and* AO and the GPU not maxed with a reasonable draw distance of say 256m. There are other benefits though - the Gainward Phantom GTX 560 ti, ran quiet and cool possibly due to the very nifty cooling system wrapped around the card - I'm yet to test the Phantom 3 but I anticipate the same. Finally I would add this is all pretty high end gear, I'm very into photography and machinima so it's worth it for me. However if you just want to play with shadows anything from a GTX 2 Series and up should do it ok assuming your CPU us pushing out enough raw data *AO or Ambient Occlusion appears to remove the jagged edges from the shadows - it's a very noticable difference