NIC card made for gamers

[Mehen]

Not enough of you guys are hardcore cs players. If there is a small difference, they will notice it. If it is enough to give some gamers an edge in the twitch shooters, they will buy it (if they have the $$). (provided of course they didn't totally BS the numbers - if it really does not work though they won't continue production of it).

[Wombat]

I know what you meant, but the slang is wrong in this specific case, and Bigfoot's using it to their advantage. They CAN reduce your ping. They CAN'T do much for latency.

[az]

Mehen, we're arguing that there WON'T be a small difference.

[Helevitia]

The framerates are bogus. They have to be. In at least some of the reviews I read, the small print says that Bigfoot is the one providing the numbers. In another, they're using a copy of F.E.A.R. provided by them (smells like quack3-ish manipulation to me).

The copy of FEAR you are referring to comes with the card, so ALL Killer NIC cards come with the game, just like video cards come with games. It just says Bigfoot on it because it comes with the game, no other reason.

Yes, one review shows bigfoot numbers, but the last review is legit. And I'm not sure if you caught the part in the first review you commented on about having 60%+ gains, but on older hardware. They even said that these kinds of gains would not be seen on newer hardware. Bigfoot claims 10-15% performance best case scenario.

I'm not sure why you are denouncing the card so much, but it's amusing I'll talk to a few co-workers and see what they think.

One thought that comes to mind is that this NIC card simply processes the packets faster, so any possible bottleneck is removed. I've never sat down and studied NIC cards in detail but from my personal experience, there is huge overhead and lots of delay. For example, if you FTP something with Windows FTP app, it sucks balls, but if you use a third party app, you can gain a much greater maximum throughput. So that can be one bottleneck, but the NIC card is another one. Latency is another and so on...But if the NIC card removes any delay, that would then allow the data to be processed faster and that could allow higher FPS.

Another interesting thing I noticed in the last review is the "gamefirst" optimization. My first thought is that this basically processes all gaming packets with a higher priority. I'm not sure how it works, but I could see that leading to lower pings as well since the packet is coming and going quicker. And what is "LLR"? I'd be interested in seeing that as well. Also, lots of memory and lots of pool buffers which are always a good thing. I'm interested in seeing a few more reviews.

[Helevitia]

Just noticed this quote in the review:

By bypassing the windows network stack the NPU greatly accelerates network processing and relieves your CPU of the chores, things within the game-engine can move along at a much higher rate and your CPU can fully “concentrate” on the parts of the game it needs to.

So this is cool, they have there own IP stack? Smaller, faster? The rest is basically what I said above, but I didn't knwo they had their own IP stack.


Also, why don't you believe the numbers in the last review? They seem legit to me. I guess more reviews will let us know for sure.

[az]

I think I've never seen a review that attributes high CPU usage to even crappy realtek cards and drivers. I simply can't believe that network processing does even add as much system strain as the KillerNIC (lol) claims to relieve.

[Nowhere]

Hmm, even I can list possiblities about what's going on, and I don't know that much about networks (I'm the case of "didn't have to play with it, so I don't know much about it")

So...reviewers use version of Fear from the producer of the card...
Fantastic. They could do almost anything with the game. Or perhaps you propose that that we should benchmark graphix cards with games provided by Nvidia? Or CPU's with benchmarks provided by Intel?

And somehow I didn't see 10-15% when quickly skipping through the review. Perhaps it's somewhere there...but the thing is it isn't said so that it will be very visible. Hey, at least people will buy the card first, expecting 10-15% perf gain, than new GFX or CPU (I think that for additional 300$ such gains are easy)

Also...I think they're trying to convince people that they're reinventing QoS.

And how exactly this NIC can remove any possible bottleneck? Quantum entanglement bewteen NIC and game servers?

[Taz]

Whilst they may be able to reduce CPU utilization by offloading some of the work to the card and they may be able to optimize network traffic by using their own TCP/IP stack I just don't see how this helps with internet gaming. Once the packets get to your router/modem/whatever they still have to take the same path and be affected by the same latency as packets sent by a normal NIC. Also replies back to these packets will be from a system using a standard NIC so will be unaffected by anything their card and drivers will be doing.

Reducing CPU utilization can be achieved by using a decent NIC and sound card rather than using the onboard ones. That said modern CPU's are fast enough for the difference to be marginal.

[Helevitia]

well, I did some brief talking with one of my co-workers. He thinks the gain may come in the form of the KillerNIC strips the ethernet and IP header from the packet and just sends data on. This makes sense sice the KillerNIC seems to have its own IP stack. Also, the CPU of the PC no longer needs to work with the windows IP stack and can concentrate on the game, then I can see where a 10-15% gain could possibly occur.

But in the end, there are so many factors, you could fart and it might make the packets move a little quicker

I don't think the card is worth $299, but I would love to see someone use this card with INfrant ReadyNAS NV and see if it helps throughput there

[Taz]

He thinks the gain may come in the form of the KillerNIC strips the ethernet and IP header from the packet and just sends data on.

Without the header how will it get to it's destination i.e. how will the routers know where to send it

[Jammrock]

I assume he meant strip off the extra stuff in the header. Kind of like how LinkSYS "boosted" their 802.11g throughput by stripping down the WiFi protocol headers and such from the packets.