Killer NIC Hands-On Testing

basscomm writes "IGN has gotten their hands on the 'Killer' NIC recently mentioned here on Slashdot and have written a two part article detailing their impressions: 'The performance boost we got out of the Killer NIC in this testing exceeds Bigfoot Networks' own claims of 10-15% gains by a long shot and certainly seems to validate the potential of the technology. We suspect, however, that the fact that these computers were marginal at running F.E.A.R. in the first place had an impact in the comparison. In many cases the non-Killer NIC machine became absolutely bogged down as particles flew and grenades exploded, enough so that the entire machine would hang for a moment as things got sorted out. Obviously this murdered average fps figures.'"

Comments

Re:Snake Oil

[ronkronk]

Ok, I'm in total agreement with everyone that the KillerNIC is smoke and mirrors. From my linux host, pinging my default gateway, I'm getting times of roughly 0.135ms... that's 135 micro-seconds. How in the hell is there any way to improve that? My Windows gaming box reports 1ms, but that's probably because it doesn't get any more granular than that. Even if they could reduce that latency to zero (impossible, because electricity/light doesn't travel that fast), no human can respond that fast anyway, so what's the use?

I especially like this part of one of their answers:

Simply running the 'ping' program is not sufficient, because it does not use your Network stack which can introduce tons of added latency.