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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.
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
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.
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
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.
It must be good! Have you seen the size of the fan on that thing ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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
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 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
But... if you read the specs, you have to run Windows in order to use it. It uses Linux, but no Linux drivers...
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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 $280 network card.
But wait, there's more!
It's also... a Linux box. And not just a Linux box, an "Open Source Linux" box.
Plus it has USB so you can connect a hard drive or headset???
OK, the basic idea is interesting. Offload all the TCP/UDP/IP processing. I have to wonder how much impact that would really have. But how does the data get onto the host computer? If it's via a driver that shows up as a NIC, then it still has to go through the network layers of the OS. If it shows up as some kind of memory, then the host applications must be written to use it. The idea of offloading a few other features too (like voice chat) is nice too, but again, you'd have to write special software or drivers or something on the host OS to use that.
And you can use it for a hard drive. If they open it, background bittorrent anyone?
Or you could just let your NIC have a hard drive for fun that you can't access. Genius!
Look, if they had a little ARM processor and it did the network stuff only, that would be cute. But I think they over built it, it's over priced, and I seriously doubt it has much impact.
I wonder if they'll make Linux drivers available *smirk*
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Manufacturers don't do it because of:
a) ROM code implies adopting some sort of code execution (ISA dependant, p.e. x86/PPC/MIPS/etc), CPU related.
b) There are also dependencies related to the system BOOT process (p.e. IBM-PC / EFI BIOS / Other), i.e. related to the boot "protocol", CPU unrelated.
b) Ignoring (a) and (b) problems, having 9x/xp/*nx drivers built-in in ROM just as backup for your media, note that the BIOS chip is nowdays quite more expensive than the 0.20$ 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?).
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.
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.
It exists, it's called OpenFirmware by Apple, and both Apple and Sun used it. Of course, since PCs didn't use it, the industry standard died and was replaced by a de facto standard, which is arch dependent.
Also, a) ROM code implies adopting some sort of code execution (ISA dependant, p.e. x86/PPC/MIPS/etc), CPU related.
Devices already have a ROM code in them, which contains execution stuff to get the card into a working order. All cards have this. On an x86 PC, this code is in x86 machine code, while for PowerPC CHRP and Sun Solaris systems it was in FCode (a Forth bytecode, which is extremely simple to write a virtual machine for).
But again, as always, the existing legacy support of the PC destroys yet another better idea.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Killer IO-APIC!
Stay alert, kids, because we'll soon be announcing Killer Keyboard Controller with Bitchin' Gate A20 Technology!
Pwn!
w00t!
Because this way they had 7 bullets of bullshit instead of 1.
With just 1 they would've had to only charge $199.99.
Linux has had TCP window scaling for a long time. The recent "bugginess" with it came from a change to its default settings that caused issues with a non-compliant device on the Internet. Read about it at KernelTrap.
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
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.
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.
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
uh... minix?
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
... 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.
Just a couple of things to add to your post:
Sun developed it and trademarked it as OpenBoot, which is the name for their impelementation of it. OpenFirmware is the name given to any IEEE 1275 conforming implementation.
The ROM code is FCode, or Forth Bytecode. This is machine independent, so you can take an IEEE1275 ethernet card from a Sun Sparc, put in a PCI Machintosh, and boot off the LAN right out of the box.
Scrambling to keep up, BIOS manufacturers added bling like being able to change the boot priority of different devices, and for the system to just carry on booting in the face of a keyboard error. Truly revolutionary.
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.
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.
My bicyles
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!
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'.
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.
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?