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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."
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.
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.
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
#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.
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
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.
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
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
It's obvious that they're all about the business here.
"Powered by Lag and Latency Reduction (LLR) Technology"
"Future-Proof: Field Upgradeable"
"UltimatePing(tm)"
"MaxFPS(tm)"
"FNA(tm)"
"GameFirst(tm)"
"PingThrottle(tm)"
Seriously, who else but a marketting department would think that it's a good idea to trademark a name describing everything "new" that your product does? And the page is so full of TLAs (three letter acronyms) that you need a glossary to read it.
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.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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.
...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!
Because this way they had 7 bullets of bullshit instead of 1.
With just 1 they would've had to only charge $199.99.
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.
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.
The problem is they describe NIC in snake-oil terms. They try to bullshit people.
The funny part majority of gamers should not care about NICs. Just anything should work if Internet connection at 1-6 Mb/s.
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...
L OHA_protocol
IE see the ALOHA protocol...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_protocol#The_A
Changing the way that the network card responded so that rather than using a random backoff time it just retried staight away would decrease the network latency but if there were several of the cards on the network all trying to do the same thing the network would grind to a halt...
There are alot of protocols with backoffs etc which could be changed to improve the individuals connection but making them faster would be a BAD THING for the network as a whole!
but, there are also other things which could be done to improve network connectivity without hurting the network as a whole... just setting up some kind of QoS on the network card so that small packets like ping response would always get pushed to the front of the queue would improve the ping time signifigantly under non-idle situations...
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
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
If you read the artical you would see that they are not claiming they invented TCP offload, but adding support for UDP offload (as most games use UDP and not TCP).
Although in saying that, I can't really see how this card is going to make much difference over the internet. Your connection or the configuration of your ISP is more likely to be where the lag is introduced rather than your NIC.
Okay that's it, I officially declare the 'internet is a series of tubes' reference not funny any more.
Yeah, to be honest, of all the things said during that horrid speech, that was the most accurage. tubes/pipes, WTF is the difference?
UDP offload???? Gimme a break :-)
The entire processing required to transform a hunk of data into a UDP packet consists of prepending a 6-byte header to the thing, containing the source port, the destination port, and 16 bits of zeroes... not exactly the sort of thing that requires immense processing power. Unlike TCP, UDP doesn't synchronize anything, doesn't reorder anything, and doesn't acknowledge receipt of packets.
How much of your processing power is ever occupied by the network card when playing a game??? Or when doing anything else for that matter. I can have several hundred bittorrent connections running on my computer, with a total transfer rate of hundreds of KiB/s, all kinds of checksumming and I/O overhead, and it still makes a 1 or 2 percent blip on CPU usage... unless a network card can magically construct a LAN between two computers at a distance, it's not going to affect latency in network gaming.
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