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Network Card for Gamers - Uses Linux to Reduce Lag

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the slave-to-the-ping-number dept.

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."

3 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Pricey by HeWhoRoams · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Yes. by Jherek+Carnelian · · Score: 5, Informative
    Even games that arent exactly TCP are typically a reliable messaging system on top of UDP that pretty much mimics TCP.

    With that said, I cant see how this network card could reduce your latency by more than 1ms or 2ms round trip.
    Given the constraints - TCP and various homegrown reliable protocols on top of UDP, it isn't too hard to come up with some options to improve latency. But they all involve violating the RFCs.

    First you have to wrap head around one important factor that can absolutely kill latency for any transport with guaranteed delivery -- packet loss. Packet loss means you have to discover what packets were lost and then retransmit them - those two steps can easily introduce delays on the order of seconds.

    So one trick would be to pre-send the retransmits. Send duplicate packets spaced apart by a few miliseconds. If the other end receives multiple copies of the same packet, it will silently discard any extras - but if one copy gets lost en route, the other packet might still make it through, thus eliminating the whole timeout/retransmit cycle. It should be possible to do this for both TCP and UDP.

    However, doing something like that is very unfriendly because it wastes resources. The primary reason packets get lost en route is because of bandwidth saturation. So, if you double or triple your traffic you are just making the problem worse. If you are the only one out of thousands who "breaks the rules" you will probably get away with it and probably even benefit from it since packet loss will be a somewhat even distribution among all traffic, so chances are if one of your packets gets dropped the copy won't get dropped - instead someone else's packet gets dropped.

    But if a significant minority of users were to do the same thing, it would probably result in a complete collapse of any usuable bandwidth. Which is exactly the kind of thing I would expect a bunch of MBA's to come up with.
  3. Tytus (Bigfoot Networks) Responds by Tytus_Bigfoot · · Score: 5, Informative

    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