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Network Card for Gamers - Uses Linux to Reduce Lag
Cujo writes "The folks at GDHardare have an interview with Bigfoot Networks discussing the pending release of their Killer Network Card which is said to greatly reduce in-game latency. According to the Interview, this card uses a Linux-based subsystem to do its magic."
Oh - and it runs FNapps, so as well as being good for games, its suitable for FNapping.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I'm sure another layer of abstraction to the network is exactly what gamers need to reduce lag.
Overloaded and slow routers will say, "Whoah, his network card RUNS LINUX. I'll shuffle these packets through more quickly."
I'd believe their hype more if we already had an openly tiered internet and these guys gave you a free year's subcription to the top tier with purchase of the card.
Pre order cost is $280. You'll see a better FPS increase spending that on a graphics card, RAM, or some groceries for 6 months.
It's always been my understanding that the bigger bottlenecks are upstream of your NIC. I mean, my home network set up goes gigabit from my desktop to my hardware router, gigabit from my router to my gateway firewall, then gigabit (minus a few MTU) to my DSL modem, and after that the speed gets massively reduced and there's nothing I can do about it. My lan latency is practically non-existant.
Can you really reprioritize your packets coming from your desktop in such a way that you make a significant gain after it hits your ISP? Or is this just cyberpenis enlargement? Seems to me that, unless you're hosting a bunch of internet spyware or network-heavy background processes, you're not going to be making much of a gain.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Aw, nice marketing. Yea, thats all I have to say.
Wow the first network card with built in Bat'leth!
Hmmmmmm
OMG, they named it the "KillerNIC"? Like, does this kind of advertising actually work?
"This NIC is so hardcore it KILLED SOMEONE!"
I can just imagine their second version coming with a muzzle a la Silence of the Lambs.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
It's a nice idea, but I'm skeptical about whether or not the promised performance boost will be worth the price. But does it run li...oh, right. So now you can say "you got pwned by my linux-powered nic!".
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
kinda OT, but something that came to mind recently....
why can't manufacturers make hardware (esp NICs) with basic 9x/xp/*nx drivers on a ROM chip? It would be so much more convenient than having to 1) (if you're lucky) have the original disk / CD, insert, and install drivers or 2) download the drivers on another machine, burn to cd / copy to disk, walk it to the other computer, etc etc...
too much to ask for?
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
This sounds like a great place to house an aimbot, if those still exist.
since when is lag caused by your local NIC? So what if you get an extra .001 ms to your router?
Never once have I seen my cpu above 5% b/c of network usage, even full network usage.
No way is this legit
81) Make sure to include "Linux" to viral marketing ads posted as 'newsposts' on Slashdot to gain support with the Linux Community.
82) Hardcore gamers will do anything for the promise of better ping, even adding another hop to their upstream
#1. It's more difficult to issue updated software in firmware.
#2. It's another chip. Software is far cheaper than hardware for OEM's.
They got Masters degrees in Business Administration, and yet their typing and conversational skills are on the level of 14-year-olds.
That's just sad.
Well, that and the fact that their "product" is clearly incapable of giving anything near the boosts they claim it gives...
As a small test, I ran up Quake 3 on it's highest settings, and had it play back a reasonably heavy demo. Now, Quake3 isn't the most modern of games, but it can still peg a CPU at 100%. Then, I found the latency to my router.
Pinging 192.168.0.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.0.1: bytes=32 time1ms TTL=255
Reply from 192.168.0.1: bytes=32 time1ms TTL=255
Reply from 192.168.0.1: bytes=32 time1ms TTL=255
Assuming this product entirely eliminates all latency on the first hop (impossible), that's a net gain of 1ms.
The entire concept of these FNApps also strikes me as a route to evil; I heard a subtext of "Now, even the most clueless Windows gamer with too much money can run packet scanning cheating tools with no chance of detection!".
I'm placing this one firmly in the "Snake oil" bin, based on this interview.
If your ISP sucks ass, a $250 lan card is not going to help.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Linux owns in everything hardware/software based. Everything today has Linux in it even if you don't know it. PDAs, Cell Phones, TV's, DVD players, Cars, Airplanes, even the U.S. Army robots use Linux. iRobot is famous for using Linux as the OS in their robots.
Linux, because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
Linux is the best
The only thing I can guess it needs Linux for is to do the routing and QoS services (see lartc.org)...
Then again, considering I get sub-1ms latencies across my network (only 100Mbps...), and this is with some rather pathetic equipment (Celeron system running Win2k), I fail to see how I can improve my 80ms ping with a better network card.
It seems that hardcore gamers are starting to become the computing equivalent of the "audiophile". From CRT displays that do 120hz refresh (do they notice the difference between 100 and 120, I wonder?) since LCDs that do 6ms are "too slow". Gaming mice that do 10k-dpi for ultra-precise positioning, videocards that cost the better part of a grand. And now, network cards that cut down microseconds or give you that extra frame per second. There's also keyboards, the gaming mousepad (though, some are nice for general use), and god knows what other accessories, doodads and other monster-cable-type things.
of a few other things are these days.
Like say, snake oil. Or those magnetic gewgaws that are supposed to give you 500% better fuel efficiency in your car.
Or, other crap that doesn't work.
It must be good! Have you seen the size of the fan on that thing ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I guess this gives rise to a new saying: A n00b and his money are soon parted.
All the founders met at the University of Texas while getting their MBAs.
That says all that needs to be said for the article.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This, of course, was covered earlier. And I still agree with the tag - I think it is snake oil.
Let's try and remember a few fundamentals. As per RFC 1925, "The 12 Networking Truths":
(Déja vu? Yes!)
Right on. This card might process incoming data quicker, or perhaps even send the data to the CPU faster, but it won't reduce latency. The high price ($280? TFA is not responding) does not justify the alleged 'improvements' in lag this card offers. Games communicating over UDP like BF2 have fairly low lag anyway (when they stay connected...). As others have said: spend the money on RAM or some other upgrade. The 'lag' improvement will be much more cost-effective.If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
" Bob Grim, Vice President of Marketing, has a wealth of sales and marketing experience from his time in Marketing at AMD"
Well this product is practically guaranteed tobe a complete commercial success then...
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
Of all the things a spiffy network card could do, reducing latency is just about the least likely.
They could have put 20mb of buffers on it.
They could buy glow-in-the-dark pc board material.
They could have put a handful of bright blinky led's on it.
They could even put on a 12AX7 vacuum tube to do something useful.
They could put built-in auto ping.
But what do they do? Put another layer of OS glop in the way. Big laffs!!
What? This may be a neat idea, although has some obvious issues as others have pointed out, but I can't trust a word these guys say after reading that.
I have never seen such a blatant premature optimization. Why have the IP stack in hardware and "pre-cache" packets for the host OS? Much cheaper to make good network drivers in the first place (and if you have latency problems you have them because of CPU depletion and no pre-caching will for ever hide that.) These MBA students should get an A+ if this crap gets anywhere above ground level.
What kind of geek wannabe would waste money on this? Nowhere on their site do they show benchmarks or even vague references to how much this will speed up your networking or FPS. Oooh! it offloads network processing, leaving your CPU free to PLAY THE GAME!!! That's probably going to speed things up by like .5%. AWESOME!!! TO THE MAX!!!
This is the tech equivalent of herbal viagra.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Somehow it seems unlikely that a 400 MHz "32 bit" CPU (probably an ARM or a Geode) running Linux can increase performance relative to a 3 GHz or so CPU running Windows. In fact, it seems most likely that this would actually slow down networking performance, especially in heavy traffic situations.
That's right! The card has high quality vacuum tubes and a special magnetic stone that will make the sound much warmer. Another great feature is that this NIC is so powerful only your packets will get to the server, so nobody can shoot at you! Seriously now, what were these guys trying to do? Probably the card was created for the FNA thing, then when they found it had no application at all, they tried to find a market for it.
OK, I thought gamers were suckers (paying $600+ for graphics cards) but really.
A $280 network card.
But wait, there's more!
It's also... a Linux box. And not just a Linux box, an "Open Source Linux" box.
Plus it has USB so you can connect a hard drive or headset???
OK, the basic idea is interesting. Offload all the TCP/UDP/IP processing. I have to wonder how much impact that would really have. But how does the data get onto the host computer? If it's via a driver that shows up as a NIC, then it still has to go through the network layers of the OS. If it shows up as some kind of memory, then the host applications must be written to use it. The idea of offloading a few other features too (like voice chat) is nice too, but again, you'd have to write special software or drivers or something on the host OS to use that.
And you can use it for a hard drive. If they open it, background bittorrent anyone?
Or you could just let your NIC have a hard drive for fun that you can't access. Genius!
Look, if they had a little ARM processor and it did the network stuff only, that would be cute. But I think they over built it, it's over priced, and I seriously doubt it has much impact.
I wonder if they'll make Linux drivers available *smirk*
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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Oooo ooooo oo oo ooooooooo ooooo ooooo Translation: I'm going to do something about this!
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Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
This sort of looks like a crappy TOE - TCP Offload Engine. You can get a TOE NIC from Chelsio for a grand that'll do gig rates. Anyone ever try to get gigabit speeds out of their NIC? It's not so easy. It takes a lot of overhead to encapsulate data inside ethernet frames. Offloading that job to your ethernet card is a nice way to keep your CPU doing the stuff you want it focused on.
/dev/random over a netcat connection and into /dev/null, too. Couldn't figure out how to do anything faster. Any ideas? Cause we were stumped.
It's sort of clever, I think. If your CPU is pegged calculating physics for a video game, or however you kids crunch math, having the NIC doing the actual packetization of your location info is a small step towards getting better response times. Honestly, I could see this being like those riceboys -- adding so much "bling" to your car that it actually slows it down in an attempt to make it look faster. *Shrug* Either way, I think this company will sell a few of these, and by a few, I literally mean few.
The fastest we've ever gotten a machine to spit data out the line was with a 10 gig ethernet card, with a TOE in it, and that rate was 1.2 gigabit/second. The bus could handle 7.6 gigabit max, but we got nowhere near that due to the framing involved. We were just piping
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
This card is meant for the "audiophile gold cable crackpot" market. It offers no real-world benefit, at a very substantial cost.
This sort of card *might* (might!) be of use in a server environment where you're trying to transfer gigabits of data at a whack. In fact, they already have it. It's called TCP Offload Engine (TOE). Unless you are rendering Doom 3 on your Beowulf cluster at 1600x1200 and sending the raw uncompressed data over ethernet, you aren't going to need this sort of card for gaming.
For lower latency, you need to ditch ethernet altogether and use a different switch fabric, like Myrinet or Infiniband. Again, not for video games.
QoS (i.e. "Gamefirst" I guess?) can have a very significant effect on ping, so it might not be entirely snake oil. However if there's more than one person on your network it's useless to have it on the NIC, and you can get decent, _cheap_ QoS on a custom firmware on a WRT54GL router. You could also get the same effect from just turning off your bloody P2P. While not entirely snake oil, this is pretty useless, people will buy it though because while there's $300++ video and sound cards, there isn't a network card that's that expensive, and you know... err... more money == better?
Does it run Linux?
hah maybe it uses qos to give game traffic higher priority then spy/malware traffic coming out of the os. I bet they did all their testing on an unpatched unfirewalled Windows box.
btw, latency is not related to bandwidth so all those"well my home network is gigabit and i have no latency" arguments don't apply. My 10mbit network has the same latency as a 10gigabit network.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Sounds like a fine BLAZEMONGER product.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
of those monster cable products(not a plug.) You take a piece of standard hardware, an RCA cable or a 10/100/1000 nic, put gold contacts on it, and a certain percentage of people will go for it. I don't think that you get much better sound out of a gold plated cable, and I don't think your gaming experience will be any better with this nic, but if it outperforms the other guy's hardware, even just on a bench test...I still won't buy it.
Weak Sauce...
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
How does the quote by Bill Gates go? "If you can't make it work at least make it look good." or something to that effect.
Its really quite funny. My favourite "feature" from The manufacturers OWN website PDF:
Ping Throttle: When other gamers complain that your ping is too low, adjust it a little higher untill they stop whining. Then, dial it back down and go in for the kill!
The guy who invented it aparently got really fed up with lag and developed special "algorithms" to optimize your packets or something. The original interview is here. The inventor basically comes off as either an amazing exercise in self deception or not terribly bright. If theres even a difference between those two things. I REALLY want to see benchmarks, but it will probably just be the phantom console all over again.
One of the interesting things is that he talks about how the game that drove his lag rage over the edge was UO, which was a really great example of crazy server lag that went unfixed for *years*. You could play on a 28.8 modem and it wasnt even THAT laggy, but everyone would mostly have world lag at the same times. But i guess this LLR tech will upgrade the servers or something. Hes a nutter. Might as well strap some magnets on the side of your nic for all the good that this will do you.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Harlan Beverly is the CEO and Mad Scientist of Bigfoot Networks
..snip....
As a side note, Harlan met his wife in Ultima Online, married her in the game, and then eventually married her in real life
Nothing more needs to be said.
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
Their specifications sheets don't want to pull up in Konqueror / KPDF... they open, but you can't read the text. Guess they're Linux-friendly only if you're running Windows...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I know theres a beowulf joke in here somewhere...
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
but not until then, because PowerPlay is the Technology of the Future!
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
For example take the CRT thing. I own such a CRT, and it's not marketed to gamers, it's marketed to professionals. Why the refersh rate then? Simple function of it's ability to go super high resolution. The monitor is rated to do 2048x1536 @85Hz. To do that, takes some fast electron guns. Well, that ability implies higher refresh rates at lower resolutions. It can do over 200Hz at 800x600 because the resolution is so low. The point is to get extremely high resolutions at usable refresh rates. Also, in general, you want your device spec'd above what it's supposed to actually do. You don't want to run it at it's limits all the time.
Likewise the mouse thing is a little misinformed. Higher DPI cameras isn't worthless on an optical mouse. It lets it track on more uniform surfaces. No matter how uniform something looks, at some point it's uneven. Well, optical mice need uneveness to track, that's why they don't work on a mirror, or a really smooth surface, they can't track details. One way to make them track better is to up the DPI. The smaller details they see, the more uniform a surface can be. That's also the point behind using a laser. Since it is truly monochromatic light, just one frequency, it shows small details in a starker contrast that is lost with normal LED light.
Though there's certianly BS targeted at the gamer market, this being some of the BS, there's plenty of products with real legit reasons to be bought. Not everyone wants an experience that is "acceptable" or "works jsut good enough to get the job done." Doesn't mean they are wasting money on the things they buy. Yes a $50 used mountain bike will get me to work and back, but that doesn't mean that I'm wasting money on a deceant $600 street bike. It honestly does work better.
Everyone is complaining that the card and marketing are various degrees of bullshit, but who really cares?
Isn't it obvious that we'll all buy this thing just becuase it *looks* so badass?
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Killer IO-APIC!
Stay alert, kids, because we'll soon be announcing Killer Keyboard Controller with Bitchin' Gate A20 Technology!
Pwn!
w00t!
...as the BitBoys Glaze3D video card that was announced about the same time that it was also announced that Duke Nukem Forever was going into development.
Oy!
macs come with both emacs and vi(m) last time i checked.
A mouse is a device used to point to the xterm you want to type in
When Windows systems are running on HDs which in turn run on embedded Linux, this is all going to get a lot more interesting.
--
make install -not war
This is a joke, right?
... Anyone else want to spend $280 to find out ??
It's completely unbelievable, literally. From the poorly rendered mockup to the made up buzz words it's actually quite funny. I'm a bit worried that the online ordering system appears to be functional, hmmm
I've seen two different comments from the founders of this business where they say game developers are "enthuthiastic" (and other exciting, developers-are-pumped-up-words). Who actually cares? It's not like their games are going to be vastly improved with this POS.
I don't know what's sadder, that some fools would actually hand over money to a bunch of MBA who claim to someow have designed a better network interface than engineers, and who can't understand that these claim are completely bogus, or that Slashdot actually gives them a soapbox to further pitch their snakeoil from (perhaps because of the use of the term Linux in the hype).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Cfosspeed is a great little program for Windows XP+ that gives an incredible ammount of control over quality of service. It detects a large number of standard protocols (http,ftp,nntp,dns...) and can set priority on a per program basis for games, voip and p2p. I reccomend it especially if you have an ADSL connection prone to a high ping while downloading. You can setup cfosspeed to prioritize your connection for low ping or high bandwidth. Unfortunately it doesn't work as intended if you have multiple computers on a router because it shapes the traffic independent of other computers, but the developers are working to add multi computer support.
g _e.htm
I've used it for almost 6 months and its given me the highest most stable download speeds I've ever seen on my DSL. My pings while downloading are almost as good as they can be. It's also very lean on CPU overhead.
here's the developers explanation on how it works
http://www.cfos.de/traffic_shaping/traffic_shapin
A: a non-onboard NIC already offloads "networking tasks" to your NIC from your CPU, not that it matters to gaming. B: upping the QoS priority of ICMP on your PC is very useless. They would be better off making some kind of XXXTreme gaming router with blinky lights and heatsinks all over it, as a router can help a bit more with QoS (although still not very much). C: these guys are idiots, but consumers are idiots too, so they will make money. D: $280 ?? AHAHAHAHAHAHAH
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
Totally tubular! tubular, hmmm wait a sec... won't this like killer nic end up blocking the bits in my internet tube? Ah, no got it. Whenever ya squeeze the hose it raises the pressure. No wonder the games will go faster. Freaky rockin' wow! and so cheep.
I guess the mods are basically admitting that the parent is 100% right, since they have now modded *him* troll... Seriously...
So, yes, I'd have to weigh in with everyone else, it's snakeoil. Basically, any product designed entirely by a marketting group is going to be snakeoil, and this definitely was.
Everyone knows the internets is a series of tubes. Well, this card hurls your data through the tubes with such force that it can't possibly get stuck.
Make sure not to point the jack at anyone. You'll shoot someone's eye out.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Will this be useful over a WAN? Depends. If the WAN is significantly faster then the bus, then yes. In most cases, people don't have access to a pipe of anything like 100 MB/s. In those cases, you gain nothing at all.
This device is for LAN parties, as far as I can tell. If it is designed correctly, it'll max out your system under those conditions. You'll get damn-near wire-speeds, even though the internal PC architecture can't handle data that fast.
The biggest question I have is: Why Linux? I use Linux because I'm a geek and because Linux is damn-near infinitely versatile. It supports protocols that have barely cooled down from being hot off the press. Games don't use, or need, SCTP. They might be able to benefit a little from DCCP or GAMMA, but no game in existance uses those. Network games are almost certain to use TCP/IP, and the fastest TCP/IP stack on the planet is in NetBSD.
I don't use NetBSD, though I do use some of the other *BSDs, but credit should be given where credit is due - NetBSD holds the record for TCP/IP throughput and so is the sensible system to use for an accelerator of this kind.
There is one - and only one - exception to this. That is when the hardware (DMA, etc) is designed to be controlled by multiple points. A lot of work has gone into Linux for clustering, and that's essentially what you'd have - a cluster, with the network card acting as the I/O node. You could transfer to/from memory (or other devices) directly without using the CPU at all, in that case. This has limited benefit if used trivially - the memory bandwidth is already so constricted that you've L1, L2 and sometimes L3 caches just to keep things going at all.
What you'd need to do is - provided the game is multithreaded - move the communications thread onto the network card, with the rest of the game staying on the CPU. The calls to and from the communications thread will generally be much more compact than the data to/from the socket layer, so it'll be much less bus-intensive and therefore substantially faster. This only works if there is a thread that can be firmly identified as handling communications, AND where the assumption of calls vs. sockets is valid.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Maybe this card reduces your ingame lag that occurs while you are downloading/uploading torrents (or other high-traffice apps) in the background. I don't see why this couldn't be done. Of course, a smarter bittorrent client would have much the same effect and likely be free.
Since it runs Linux and apparently I can write code for it,
if (packet.sender = "World of Warcraft") {
packet.contents('health') = "100%";
}
I'll never lose at WoW!
...for this so-called so-called gaming card is readable here. I ain't buying it.
Compared to existing NICs their card actually seems to slow down performance.
_ LLR_White_Paper.pdf/ you can see that their card can generate 20.15 MegaBytes/s of throughput. From the results in their whitepaper they come out far on top, beating NVIDIA's nForce system by almost 3x the performance.
/ . Anandtech's benchmark paints a totally different story. All the chipsets featured in the whitepaper are included in this review, and as you can see, they perform significantly better than Bigfoot leads you to believe. They are all able to sustain upwards of 118 MB/s of performance (divide the benchmark results by 8 for MegaBytes). While I know it's hard to directly compare benchmarks their results are so far off that I find them very suspect.
If you read their white paper http://www.killernic.com/KillerNic/PDFs/KillerNic
Anandtech has an interesting comparison of ethernet performance in one of their mainboard reviews http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2696&p=11
This new item is nothing more than Quantum Speaker Cables for PC Gamers.
:( oh, and here I thought my Mac was safe from all those evil software programs.
I curse you emacs! Begone and go to the torturous hell from whence you had spawned!
Hm, it didn't work, emacs is still installed.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Because everyone needs 400mhz of network card power to save .001 miliseconds of lag!
Error 2101: all your sig are belong to us
I mean, can I... install OSX on it?
I can stop being fragged, because ill be going from 25ms pings to 22ms pings...OMG think of how much faster everything is going to be on my $7,500 gaming rig my parents bought me..its going to speed up ordering pizza online too...all i need now is a toilet in the basement, and ill never have to leave...
Most switches don't use store and forward. That is fairly old switching technology. Most switches (and routers too) use some form of fast packet switching similar to Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) that reads the first packet of a stream, learns its path through, and all the following packets of that stream are immediately forwarded 'bit by bit'.
You can't curse that many years of elisp of out existance that easily. And for that matter, though he be slightly portly and rather ominously bearded, Richard Stallman hardly passes for even a remote semblance of a torturous hell. Not to mention the difficulties in actually placing the emacs back into the Stallman... :p
(( for the record, uses emacs and likes it
They're there affecting their effect.
So... they must have invented TCP offload around the same time Al Gore was inventing the Intarweb?
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
You are mostly right and partly wrong. Store and forward vs. cut through isn't really an issue anymore as it is very rare to see store and forward (unless it's a broadcast frame). These are buffering issues, where CEF is a propriatary forwarding technology whereby the entire routing table (FIB) is put into memory in a quickly accessable hash. Fast switching and CEF are both routing enhancements. You sound as though you are explaining the original multi-layer switching model: netflow switching. The first packet of a stream was inspected at process level and then a netflow entry was built. Subsequent packets in that stream hit the netflow shortcut and required no process lookup. This is specific to multi-layer switches. I would say the majority of latency on the megaweb is not from switches - it's probably an mostly distance and then some is router latency.
So would a killerNic "killer" be a nic with firewire it in instead of usb 2.0?
some one please tell me why i cannot just run a linux box as a router to my normal nic and get the same perf. gains.
also, even if this card had a sub $100 price tag would anyone buy this?
... I hadn't realized time had gone by so fast. Damn, April 1st already. Missed a whole season of skying. :-|
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
When he's drunk and loudmouthed, we remember that he was born in the US.
As a side note, Harlan met his wife in Ultima Online, married her in the game, and then eventually married her in real life.
'Nough said.
people have been building off-loading cards for TCP for years (I remember the first round of them back in the mid 80s), as a rule they don't work that well - better to put the smarts closer to the apps
Now of course if you could 'lower ping times' by rewriting game's packets on the fly to look as if you had faster latency ...... (wait isn't that sort of what they are claiming - the ability to dial in one's ping times ....)
Hey everyone, I am the inventor of the Killer NIC. I will not try to hijack your thread, so this will be my only post. Thanks for the interest in our Killer Network Card. It has been my personal vision for years. A lot of very good questions have been raised here, and I think a lot of them are answered in our FAQ here: http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/FrequentlyAskedQues tions.aspx . If there are still questions, I would love to try to answer them at our sponsored community site:
http://www.endlagnow.org/ELNForums/ Thanks, Tytus
I bet this card is so good it gives you more bandwidth too! In in for two of 'em - I'll setup line bonding and be faster than all the telcos put together!
uh... minix?
The Nforce 5 chipset offloads networking form the cpu and it is built in the motherboard. This card is only pci so it can even use gig-e at full speed nforce 570 and 590 for amd or just 590 for intel has 2 ports with teaming.
If *you* suck ass, it's not going to make you any better either.
(or so says my the rest of my BF2 squad)
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Not to mention the difficulties in actually placing the emacs back into the Stallman...
;)
I don't know... I suppose there are many a VI(M) user that would like like to at least try
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
If the goal is to offload as much of the network processing, which btw is going upstream to a link MUCH slower than any NIC, assuming not everyone is in the same LAN, then why does it have such large host processing requirements?
IF you are driving the card to wireline speed, you'll see a performance jump, under Windows, because the CPU isn't addressing the NIC, it's just handing off the data to be sent to the Transport Offload Engine (TOE) on the card, which then sends it via DMA out to the wire. If you're lan-partying, on a Windows box, it might make a difference on a 100Mbit card. A Gig-E or higher is a slightly different story, as is with running on Linux. With Linux, you're already close to those performance levels with any old NIC at up to Gigabit speeds. With Gig-E or 10Gig-E, your CPU's overhead with all the cache touches, etc., you'll start seeing more and more demand from the machine (And more benefit) from those cards.
Now, having said this, it's an Offload Engine- this means that you've done an end-run around ANY security measures on-machine you might have
for networking, etc. (In other words, if you're using a firewalling app on the machine, you're wasting your time if you're using this NIC...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You want one of the following (in order of desirability):
1) Intel
2) Marvel
3) Via/Rhine
4) RealTek
And fuck the rest.
Yes, fuck Broadcomm and their shitty SMP-deficient drivers.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You have to wonder that with this thing running a native version of linux on the card itself if you could place linux based game hacking utilities on the card that make use of packet hacks to hack your games. This would allow you to bypass things like Blizzards hack checking utility and things like that. I wonder if anyone has examined those possibilities.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
While I'm not saying this stuff's not snake oil, there is something to be said for something else
that slows down the framerates that has little to do with latency in and of itself- what's your
CPU utilization when you're pushing data down the wire?
With 100Mbit cards, the utilization can approach 50-60% at full wireline speeds.
With 1Gbit cards, if you don't do clever things to offset the CPU use, it can be as 80%.
We won't even go into raw 10Gbit speeds...
If you're burning 20-25% of your CPU handling the NIC at load in a game at a LAN Party, it would
make some small sense to offload that onto something else- IF it really made that much of a
difference. It remains to be seen what they've done, but it looks like a TOE that also supports
UDP packets (Though there's not a LOT to be done there to be offloaded...). At a 100Mbit rate,
it's a difficult sell to convince me that it's worth >$200 for a card to do transport offload
just so I can see an extra 5-20fps on an otherwise already maxed out machine. This is being
sold to enthusiasts with more cash than brains, I suspect. Now, if they offer this as a generic
offload engine for higher speeds, say 10Gbit Ethernet, for the purposes of a cluster interconnect,
then they might have my interests...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Well, optical mice need uneveness to track, that's why they don't work on a mirror, or a really smooth surface, they can't track details. One way to make them track better is to up the DPI. The smaller details they see, the more uniform a surface can be.
That's it! I'm off to sandpaper my desk! Who's sniping with the railgun NOW?
... at the GDC in San Francisco earlier this year, and posted the results - http://www.gamerati.net/index.php?option=com_conte nt&task=view&id=118&Itemid=1
He's a slick little monkey. The second he figured out that I wasn't buying the claims after I kept insisting on a single hard number or physical card, he ended the interview, and then cancelled the rest of the media interviews that day. His "white paper" is hype, and so is his whole company - at the 8th grade level. It's sad, really.
I put him up there with Infinium Labs - and I don't expect he'll send us a sample card.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
Run the ATM stack on your machine, miss out the local area network entirely. In theory that removes a hop and therefore that hop's latency from the route between you and the server. Not impossible, but you'd have to be a hard core gamer and a little dim to bother.
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Which is fair enough, some big server cards do this, it's quite neat and frees up the CPU for other tasks. Same idea as SCSI, I2O or the GPU in video cards. in which case a game might well run faster with the card installed.
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We got about 10000 glossy little cards for this to stuff in PAX bags. By the end of the day, all you had to say was "Ping Throttle" and the ENTIRE bagging line burst into laughter. The claims they make are so ridiculous, it's not funny.
So, do I already have one of these network cards installed, then?
Or will it make my pings even faster than <1ms?
And how does it remove latency introduced by my ISP/ADSL connection?
(Both PCs involved in the ping are just using onboard ethernet interfaces, of course - not even a fancy $30 3Com NIC.)
Awesome snake oil.
As for offloading your CPU from all that massive overhead of formulating a packet once per frame, well gosh. I'm thinking of releasing a PCI card that runs Linux that games can use whenever they need to divide floating point numbers by 5 or 7.5. Game developers will be super-excited about that, as well. Won't they? It would have about the same effect. I'm thinking $280 would be a fair price. Who's with me?
They're right. There are literally no other products available that allow me to have a Linux command prompt on my PC.
WTF would I want that, anyway?
And, of course:
Notice how they didn't follow it up with the question "What do you say to the customer who says you are totally full of shit?" Nice job with the interview, guys :-)
Did it occur to anyone else this card might simply change the Type of Service field in packets to something that gets a higher priority by ISPs and backbones?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The line starts here ;o)
The general population is so confused by technology they can easily take one concept they grasp and mis-apply it.
For instance, my sister-in-law is convinved her cell phone battery dies quicker when she is calling long distance numbers. To the average slashdotter, that is laughable... but think about it from her point of view - batteries die more quickly when they are used for more intensive stuff... her cell phone is calling a number further away. Throw in the 'power of suggestion', and the rest is an obviousl false conclusion. She has no idea how cell phones actually are talking to a local tower, so it is a reasonable but ignorant (in a non-insulting sense) conclusion.
I still had fun telling her my theory that global warning is caused by the extra hour of sunlight from daylight savings time, and that the ocean levels are rising because the chemicals we are dumping into the oceans are killing all the sponges.
Come on people, this is so definitely a joke. :)
A good one though.
Their flash site is practically written like an Onion article.
I've just sent it to the PTO so you are all screwed
How could this reduce latency appreciably?
1/ Reduce the load on the system CPU by off loading some networking tasks? What will that buy you? 0.1%? 1%?
2/ Tag all of the packets from that machine as being higher priority for QoS routers which may bump up their priority? You can do that at your own router/gateway. Buy a gaming router or do-it-yourself with BSD/pf, Linux, etc.
3/ Reduce the latency of the interface itself? Oh yeah, that will provide huge gains!...
Pinging my OpenBSD firewall, I get an average of 0.165mS. Pinging the gateway at my ISP (1536/256 ADSL), I get an average of 11.3mS. Even if this card performed a miracle on the order of water-into-wine and reduced the latency to my firewall down to 0mS (absolute), the latency to my next hop is still 11.1mS. A whopping 1.8% improvement if Jesus is the man behind this card. Any QoS packet tagging that this card might be doing, would be pointless, because my firewall is dealing with my gaming QoS and other gamers can do the same or use a router which does it for them.
And they want how much for this card? Is Jesus going to personally come out and install it for me? And while he's here bless me with super lightning fast reflexes, while we break bread?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I'm sure the ability to throttle your transfer rate to induce warping in multiplayer games like counter strike when they feel they might be in danger will be extremely attractive to 13 year old FPS fanatics...
Maybe i've been spending way too much around router and switches, but it seems there are few things they forgot to consided. 1) Unlike graphic cards/motherboard/cpu/etc, an IP network is not a closed system. you can have the fasted and best card money can buy, but you're at the mercy of the weakest link. Dodgey router or crapin out switch port? your traffic will slow down just like everyone else's 2) XP Pro's network stack. Just 4 months ago, MS released code for Server 2003 SP1 and R2 to better use TCP Offloading Engines (TOE). While the TOS support (chimney and reverse side scaling) are some really cool shit, i dont recall whitepaper one showing the improvments made to XP's IP stack to kick it up a few notches. 3) QoS. The "Game First" feature is just a glorified name QoS or quality of service. QoS has two basic requirments for it to be worth a damn. a) every rotuer and switch port must respect it. b) no rotuer or switch port rewrites the markings. You can mark your packets CS7 (network control critial data), but if your hitting your $50 dollar linksys home nat-toy, its getting FIFO queued (First in, First Out). And, if the ISP and Carriers have admins worth the papaer the admin's check's printed on, that admin is NOT going to respect an end user's packet and remarking them back to 00 (coach class priorty). I think that is even the default for IOS (dont quote me on it), rewrite the DSCP and COS values back to 00/0. But... If you're still intrerested in the card, i have some prime real estate for sale ;-)
It's a router... or a bridge... in the network card. WTF?
.013 ms, so if you're seeing more than that, you have other problems, or you're on a wireless network, in which case your games will always suck.
Ok, it either breaks RFCs and causes even MORE lag when you get more than one or two on a network, or it basically does what current stateful firewalls do for you anyway -- defragment packets before they get sent through.
So, if you already have a cheap router on your home network -- and you probably do if you have wireless -- this part is done for you already.
Now about that ping... Assuming it's not breaking any RFCs, I haven't heard ANYTHING to suggest that this can do ANYTHING to improve traffic, once it's beyond your network. Now, gamers, go ahead, ping your routers. That's almost certainly 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1, but it's not hard to figure out if you know what you're doing. I have NEVER seen a ping to the router of a LAN of more than 2-3 ms, and usually we're talking about
As I continue to read through the spec sheet, all I see is either:
"Gee, any off-the-shelf router already does this!"
or:
"Gee, even if that's true, my $100 mobo includes a NIC that already does this. Even if not, the maybe 5% of CPU that you'd save surely costs less than the $280 you're charging for this card."
Really, go the fuck home. I don't want any of these anywhere near my networks, much less my gaming rig.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
From the FAQ :
Killer shaves off these extra milliseconds while also prioritizing gaming network packets. ICMP Ping that can be run from a DOS prompt (ICMP Ping) does not actually measure the overhead of the operating system's network stack.
while this is a utterly bogus claim, basically what they say is "don't worry if you don't notice any change, that's expected". Considering that a gamer's machine can easily eat 2-4 Gbps of UDP traffic at 100% CPU, I suspect that 1 Mbps would at most eat 0.025%, which should not be noticeable at all. By the way, I find it funny that this card pretending to increase performance is still limited to a PCI bus, limited to less than 1 Gbps in+out, and with latencies as high as 4 microseconds at 33 MHz.
Have you seen the design ? It's just a card for hardware modders, it seems to even have leds. I suspect that the card will basically do nothing but the people running it will say "look at my NIC, it's beautiful and blazingly fast, have you seen how faster I run ?"...
As long as they swindle those stupid people, I don't really mind...
Willy
Those of us with an embarrassingly large playtime in MMOGs would probably say that filling in the blanks due to lost packates (as seen in games like Everquest and everything today) is certainly better than waiting for retransmits (like in the original Ultima Online), but often enough, you ended up chasing ghosts.
This was merely annoying as a newbie, chasing orc pawns in overloaded starter zones, but in much later stages the same feature could result in writing off hours of playtime for 40 people in unforgiving raid zones.
While the network card Might improve the network connectivity for that one person, it more than likely does it by hurting the performance of the the network as a whole...
That sounds like killing two birds with one stone....
1) Decrease my latency
2) Increase the latency of everyone else, including the snipers in CS
This could be a gamer's paradise... It will be infinite successful.
OTOH if it doesn't work, then it makes a great gift for a `friend'.
It's a Linmodem!
Get your Unix fortune now!
But but, without humor, the Internet will loose all its dry tubes; imagine all that water flowing .. arrr... bedtime zzzzzzzzzzzzz
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I'v got a question. Have you ever been to 'pound me in the ass' prison? Because thats where you will be going if you really start this fraud.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I will kick your ass on a $5 Realtek, Mr i got a $230 nic hooked to a 50$ cable modem.
wow, only 235 days till april 1st, or is this post just 130 days late?
They claim that game developers are very excited about the improvements in FPS that they've been shown but where are the numbers? Did I miss them somewhere? I mean really if they had really big improvements then they'd be touting them wouldn't they? Hell they'd be comparing using the KillerNIC to other NICs on the same computer at the same location using different online games on public networks. Just wait until any of the gaming sites get their hands on samples and then we'll see if it is just all a load of hype.
The tables will turn once more my friend. AMD have come from behind more than once before. Have faith.
I had a card like this back in 1998. It was a 3Com Etherlink with "Parallel Tasking II"... Except that it actually did make a difference with the PCs of that day, and cost a hell of a lot less.
Sadly, I know some people who will probably actually buy a network card like this... LOL KILLER! How ridiculous.
Can these guys sell me one of those funky shielded power cables for my stereo too? I have a lazy grand that I'd like to blow on stuff that will make absolutely no difference to my life.
There are 3 main types of frame fowarding
1 Store and forward
Reads the entire frame checks it then sends
2 Cut through
Starts foward as soon as posible ie after it reads the destination MAC address
Fragment free
As cut through but it reads a short way into the frame to detect errors (most errors happen very early in the frame)
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
i am not much into hardware, so please forgive me if i misunderstand this. i understand that clients in a lan would benefit of this new technology.
... you name it).
Nowadays games are played over the internet and a lot more than a couple of NIC's and hubs are involved.
Plus, most of the game load is usually transferred over udp, tcp chanells usually exist just to transport very few reliable game information (like player infos upon server joins, round start/end info
So if i get this right, this techmology (sic) would help on a lan, games are not played often on a lan anymore and since we are in the age of affordable gigabit ethernet, where is the point (concering gaming) ?
-S
UDP still carries a checksum, which does involve doing calculation over the entire contents of the packet and header. I admit, the calculation is simple, and the amount of data in the packet is small, but it is non-zero.
:)
Also, IP supports packet fragmentation and reassembly. This is why you can send a 5000 byte UDP packet on an Ethernet network, which sends data in chucks of 1500 bytes. I think the main "win" here is that by handling fragmentation on the network card, you avoid the main CPU having to context switch to collect the state before the entire IP packet has arrived. I also freely admit you probably don't get many packets of this size during gameplay.
You are right that network processing does not require much processing power, but that's not the point. The point is latency. The checksum calculation can be sped up by doing it on an ASIC (as this board does I think), and the fragmentation/reassembly can be sped up by avoiding extra context switches of the main CPU.
Personally, I doubt going from (for example) 30 msec to 25 msec ping time is worth it, but I also don't think getting 100 frames per second versus 70 frames per second from your graphics card is worth it, so what do I know?
OMFG, these guys are a shell company funded by the big telecos to put out a product that will destroy the internet! The telecos will then declare that they must go with tiered service levels to avoid these kinds of problems in the future.
Evil.
Ok so this will fight lag?
Hmm, it will boost the FPS of my system. Well I could believe it, since most SOHO onboard features eat a little CPU.
But tell me, how will this on fight lag on the internet? I mean, yes the card "might" reduce lag between my PC and router, but the card cant do anything about latencies on the internet......other than fake it.
I don't see anything particularly exciting in the current AMD roadmap. They have quad core, but so will intel.
The only advantage I see left for AMD now is that their memory system scales better, so for 4 & 8 way servers they may still have an advantage.
That and joining w/ ATI, possible hypertransport gfx/ integrated CPU & GFX core anyone? but that stuff will probably take a _while_ to get to market.
as far as faith... well that's just plain silly. AMD is a company that want's your dollar just as bad as Intel. This isn't Linux vs Microsoft, where there is a huge philosopical / ethical difference between the two offerings, regardless of how well either one works.
AMD has come a long way in the last 10 years, from cheap knock of to industry leader w/ x64 and the 32 bit athlon was strong particularly in the early p4 days. Eventually their chips will leapfrog Intel's, but until then the core-duo is hands down the best pc chip out there.
AMD's major contribution is healthy competition to the market. But buying an inferior product just to artificially support competition is anti-market. It promotes inefficency. Make AMD work for your dollar. That's what intel did. They had to drop netburst & start from scratch. But they now have the better product, not the least of motivation behind it was beating AMD's then superior product.
Sign me up!
Yeah... somehow the Linux on the card reaches out across the Internet and makes my wire signals travel faster and makes sure my packets are prioritized across all routers. These guys are betting on advertising that their card has Linux on it being a selling point where the likes of /. readers will buy it simply because it has Linux on it (so they can brag to their similarly clueless friends). Of course, you could probably take the card and get the source and do other neat things with it if you had the time and the interest to do such things.
And that would explain why they are decent.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Can someone explain to me why I need a P4 or Althon 64 with a 256MB 3d card to use a NIC with a built-in QOS engine?
Look up the Realtek 8139 or some of the older SMC cards. I really do enjoy the part about the small number of registers.
And behold, a command prompt and he who sat upon it, his name was shutdown and -h 3:11 followed with him
I'm working on my MBA right now and about half of my class are engineers from Lockheed, Northrop, Harris, and a few other defense contractors. Not exactly dopes. The MBA was originally designed for engineers to obtain some business skills.
Congress wants to make sure your tubes are tied if you are serving up porn. ... to protect the children and all that!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
From the official stats WoW improves by 10-20ms and quake 4 by a whole 3-6ms
a kPeek.pdf
http://www.killernic.com/KillerNic/PDFs/KillerSne
2. Submit story to slashdot mentioning Linux.
3. Profit!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Higher CRT refresh rates are also good if you're using the sync signal to drive stereo shutter glasses.
If they actually make one, I'll take it. If it's a PCI card and can run even a stripped down verison of linux, think how useful it would be. Stick it in a PC, and you got a "friend" on the network that is near undetectable. Could also be used for good reasons, i.e. network admin/testing. That's what I'd want one for...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Is this thing for a home server that acts as a proxy/router for gaming computers connected to it?
If so, then D-Link already has a $100.00 gaming router that prioritizes UDP game packets.
Is this thing for a gaming rig?
Most hardcore gamers set up their computers as dual-bootable systems. One for mainstream apps that's allowed to pollute the OS, and the other as a bare-bones system with NOTHING loaded but drivers and the games.
I wonder if I'll have to install a virus-checker when in-game Ads start appearing tho.
Plus some special NICs have a feature to offload functions off the cpu and onto the netcard.
Now, if they could only offload PunkBuster crap off my cpu, then they might have something.
Aha! So this is how they're going to improve latency:
(From Bigfoot Networks FAQ)
Q:
Why are the system requirements so high?
A:
Because if you dont have the minimum system requirements: we would recommend you upgrade your other components first: then consider a Killer. Killer is designed to give a performance boost to nicely configured gaming systems.
Ellidi