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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."
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.
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.
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
Manufacturers don't do it because of:
a) ROM code implies adopting some sort of code execution (ISA dependant, p.e. x86/PPC/MIPS/etc), CPU related.
b) There are also dependencies related to the system BOOT process (p.e. IBM-PC / EFI BIOS / Other), i.e. related to the boot "protocol", CPU unrelated.
b) Ignoring (a) and (b) problems, having 9x/xp/*nx drivers built-in in ROM just as backup for your media, note that the BIOS chip is nowdays quite more expensive than the 0.20$ that costs the driver CD, or the ~0$ that costs the driver update download.
In the other hand, what you point could be possible -and interesting- if:
1) Make/adopt an industry standard CPU emulation for booting CPU-independant BIOSes, p.e. using some kind of Java-like CPU emulation (like the way the PPC comunity uses PCI boards with x86 BIOSes).
2) Make/adopt an industry standard BIOS boot protocol.
3) Wait until some PC manufacturer put an 64Mbit BIOS, for loading a 8MB Linux.
BIOS, drivers, and such are so inconvenient given the multiple OS available (which is a good thing). I hope some day someone bring the solution for that nonsense, may be there is necessary some kind of *clean* abstraction layer above these things (and, why not other Linux operating on a secondary CPU I/O dedicated subsystem?).
This is offtopic, but I have to mention this while we're talking about audiophiles. About a month ago, I saw in a shop a device even more blatantly pointless than this NIC. It was an "A/V USB cable". Gold-plated. That's right, ordinary USB cables are not good enough for running a projector, presumably because those cheap stainless steel USB connectors introduce too much noise into the (digital) signal.
(For anyone who doesn't frequent the same shops as crazy people, it is common to gold-plate the connectors of analogue audio connectors to improve the quality of the signal. Presumably the untarnishable gold reduces the resistance of the connection. This gets taken to rather silly extremes when gold-plated 3.5mm connectors are marketed for use with low-quality stuff like MP3 players.)
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
....and probably bypasses any software firewall on your machine at the same time... how long till there is an exploit to get the network card to trigger 'gaming mode' for a worm... my bet is 2 days from release...
The word is "elitism". There will always be people willing to lay down serious money to maintain their egos. Cars, stereos, guns, computers, home theaters, women ... you name it, somebody will pay too much for it just to get that special "God, I'm just so much better than everyone else" feeling. Of course, most elitists are in reality fools (and if male, typically equipped with miniscule sexual apparatus) but if you tell them how idiotic they look they'll just go spend even more money to prove you wrong. That can be entertaining, actually ... just keep pissing them off by saying things like "yeah yeah, that's cool, I guess, but you know my friend Bob has twenty-seven terabytes running on his home network" and watch their credit-card balances soar.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yeah audiophiles are very easily fooled. I laugh every time I hear about digital technology being described in analog terms, which is terribly common in the audiophile realm. It's sort of understandable though because "digital" is so variable whenever we interface with the analog world. Not all AD/DA converters are created equal. Audio CD playback is very similar to analog technology in that it's designed play right through and mask errors which can result in high frequency distortion and various other artifacts that one might not expect from "digital" and how that term is marketed. It can be difficult to understand, so why wouldn't the quality of a USB cable be as important as the quality of a microphone cable or the weight of a speaker cable? Well, most of us would say "duh", but the second big problems is that these people can "hear" the difference! Ah the power of suggestion. You won't find a lot of double blind studies published by audiophile gear manufacturers.
:)
Aside from $30,000 speaker cables (I shit you not), my most favorite audiophile product is a wooden knob that costs $500. "What does the wooden knob do, though?" Well, nothing on its own. It is in fact, a wooden knob. A knob made from wood. It sounds great when attached to your volume pot, though. Five hundred dollars please.
So today we learn about a network card that somehow reduces lag by implementing hardcore quality of service on an endpoint that is for all intents and purposes dedicated to a single application. Are gamers analogous to audiophiles? "Quake III is a lot more responsive now. My ping is about the same, but I can feel the difference." It must work though. I mean, who would make something and charge so much for it if it didn't actually work?
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.
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.
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.
I like the past tense tone of your post. "This definitely was." That's has a nice finality to it. Screw hype.
ping doesn't put much load on your networking stack. Try that with large UDP (or better yet, TCP) frames, at a rate which actually saturates your network, on a gigabit network - and you'll start to see what network card latency is all about (hint: you'll never get the last 300Mbit out of that gigabit network without doing something about the latency of your network card and kernel's networking stack).
Not sure why it's relevant to games, but low-latency high-intelligence network cards are very important for heavy duty servers.
... 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.
Or better yet, how long until there is an exploit to root the OS in the card itself?
One of the cooler features of this card is that it can be programmed to run things like firewalls on its own processor.
Ah, yes, and leave it to Radio Shack to sell them.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
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!
Drivers or Card? Who gives a rat's ass?
I am not a driver engineer nor hardware engineer.
There have been several times throughout history in which ATI had (theoretically) better hardware. But, as we all know, their drivers sucked some sludge into the intake valve. Only a nimrod stands around bragging about the superiority of their hardware while playing BF2 without textures.
Spruce Goose anyone? Better drivers and it might have REALLY flown a second time. Fix the drivers after delivery when they are pretty much completely busted? Well, we'll just plain cancel ya!
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.