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Investor Money Goes To Magic Lag Reducing Tech

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i-would-like-that-for-conversing-with-relatives-too dept.

Gamasutra reports on Texas technology company Bigfoot networks, which just received a $4 Million investment to develop a lag-reducing hardware PC card. From the piece: "According to the firm, it will bring to market the world's first Gaming Network Accelerator card, which will allow online gamers to play their favorite games with less lag. The company explained: 'Lag is the number one problem in online video games today, and Bigfoot Networks is the only company in the world whose sole mission is to fight lag', but gave no specific technical explanation about how it intends to do this." Greg Costikyan spells it out on the Games*Design*Art*Culture blog: "So yes, there might be a business here. But if so, it will be a business built largely on bullshit."

4 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Is it something like PowerPlay? by Stormwatch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Valve came up with this "PowerPlay" technology, which promised the same thing... but in the end it was as fake as Infinium's Phantom.

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    Circumcision is child abuse.
  2. So...what causes lag? by Short+Circuit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are many different causes of lag, from network congestion, to I/O limitations on the server and client side. (Ever had an antivirus program start a deep scan in the middle of a match?)

    Right now, with the proliferation of antivirus and antispyware software, I could see something designed to alleviate I/O constrictions as being very beneficial to gamers. Perhaps a battery-backup+cachedrive device to chain between the hard disk and the I/O controller. If an application can request that its data be cached, you no longer have to worry about seek times in reading data off the drive. (You could conceivably reduce your RAM and VRAM requirements, too!)

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    tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
  3. It's already been tried with dialup by WreckDiver · · Score: 2, Interesting
    U.S. Robotics used to sell an "Internet Gaming Modem" that claimed to improve response times by optimizing the route between the player and the server. For playing MMO's, which tend to be hosted on server clusters instead of individual computers, the performance seemed to get worse.

    http://www.usr.com/support/overview-template.asp?p rod=s-game

    http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/3com/gamingmodem/

    Their Performance Pro modem also claims to have a gaming mode:

    http://www.usr.com/products/home/home-product.asp? sku=USR5610B

  4. Re:Weakest link? by 0xABADC0DA · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Many games will either compress their network traffic or (lightly) encrypt it or both. They don't want the protocol reverse engineered and easily observable because then you get client-side cheats that monitor the stream and add enhancements (information overlays/sounds, os-level keypresses to push buttons in the game, etc). A card that did the decompression/decoding fast in hardware could easily cut a few ms off the delay.

    There are plenty of other ways to squeeze our a few ms on the client side. Sure this product is probably just hype, but to be so sure it has to be a scam is just close minded and unimaginative.