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'Killer' Network Card Actually Reduces Latency
fatduck writes "HardOCP has published a review of the KillerNIC network card from Bigfoot Networks. The piece examines benchmarks of the product in online gaming and a number of user experiences. The product features a 'Network Processing Unit' or NPU, among other acronyms, which promise to drastically reduce latency in online games. Too good to be true? The card also sports a hefty price tag of $250." From the article: "The Killer NIC does exactly what it is advertised to do. It will lower your pings and very likely give you marginally better framerates in real world gaming scenarios. The Killer NIC is not for everyone as it is extremely expensive in this day and age of "free" onboard NICs. There are very likely other upgrades you can make to your computer for the same investment that will give you more in return. Some gamers will see a benefit while others do not. Hardcore deathmatchers are likely to feel the Killer NIC advantages while the middle-of-the road player will not be fine tuned enough to benefit from the experience. Certainly though, the hardcore online gamer is exactly who this product is targeted at."
First Post
But the only real concern in making a killer NIC is keeping all the processing off of the CPU and bus. If the CPU/MB can shuffle packets at and from the NIC at the speed of the data bus, then it can't get much faster unless you want to offload protocols to the NIC etc.
A killer NIC? LOL what a phrase... Aren't there several of these Nicolas guys in jail already? right next to the killer Bobs and killer Joes.... sheesh
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
How can a NIC decrease the latency in any noticable way? Especially when playing over the Internet? Does it process ICMP echo reply packets in hardware so that the ping values will just look more l33t? :-P
this card is for the gamer that needs two clocks: one set to tomorrow and one set to Tokyo time, so he knows when to drift race.
(sorry for mangling to PA quote)
Seriously, $200? WTF?
We were ripping at it a few months back... so we are afraid to talk about it.
However, was this on a net connection, across a cable line? Or was it on a high end switch setup with good cables running at gigabit speeds? No I did not read TFA, I'm just raising a question so I can be yelled at and answered.
You mad
Killer network cards have been around for so long, there's actually a Localtalk version here:
http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/
I have a friend who works at a game studio who had their IT guy perform several tests to see if it did anything... chat log:
> killer NIC. bad.
> file transfers = 1/4 of the speed of a normal NIC
> the drivers are fucking TERRIBLE to install/uninstall/update, you have to reboot. then it'll let you do whate you need to do. then reboot AGAIN...
> and when it does start working, there is literally no difference in either framerate or ping, even on the games they say it specifically improves
Where's the comparison between different onboard gigabit chipsets? (eg Broadcom, nForce, etc.) Where's the comparison between different PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Expressgigabit NICs?
If applicable, what are the settings for the onboard NICs being tested? Many have options for various CPU offload settings and optimizations for throughput or CPU usage.
Until we see these, how can we be sure if a high-end regular PCI-e NIC won't work just as well?
If you're comparing it to an onboard that shares main cpu it can't help but be better.
but no word on what the onboard nics were. And there didn't compare it with other nics either.
So for what it's worth, the 'killer' nic is probably better than the most cheap ass realtek nic. A 3com 3c905 nic costs hardly costs $30 and performs way better than the average realtek stuff.
You are better off buying a good set of speakers and a good sound card. Especially in gaming, the aural experience will make the game more entertaining and the card will take a load off your cpu which will buy a few FPS's. This smacks of the physics cards and we know where that market went. So the top gamers will see a benefit. So what? The fact that they are in that category means they wax the rest of us regularly. How will this make that more enjoyable.
If nothing else, when it comes to enjoying the game, it sounds like the money is better spent on a good single malt to sip on during.
What's more interesting is that the card is actually a single-board computer with PowerPC processor and 64 MB of RAM!
Business Development Guy: We need a new product. Something... niche. Something overpriced. I know! Don't we still have a bunch of boxes of old network cards?
Hardware Engineer: Uh, yeah. We were about to offload them on eBay to make room in our closet...
Business Development Guy: No! Lets tack on some parts from China and sell them! We'll call it, hmm.. the Killer NIC! Since no one wants to buy NIC cards, we'll overprice them for no apparent reason! $250 a pop!
* Hardware Engineer bashes his forehead on the desk.
Hardware Engineer: You've got to be kidding me. Isn't that, like, fraud?
Business Development Guy: Not at all. We'll just never say how it works, only that it works. The processor will be for like, decorative purposes. Consumers love that kind of stuff!
Latency is 99% percent due to delays over the Internet, not anything that happens on your local machine. What does this card do, sprinkle magic fairy dust over packets so they go faster through the wire?
This reminds me of gold-plated power cords for sound systems. Guaranteed to create richer, deeper sound!
This NIC card has no clothes. But hey, phishing schemes and Nigerian con artists can be successful so why shouldn't this?
it's lubricant, so your rockets travel through the pipes faster than the other guys.
What I understand about previous readings about this product, the card tampers with the ethernet protocol to send more than it's supposed to. Here's another great idea; make a card that detects when another player on the LAN is broadcasting and make a deliberate "collision" so that the data packet needs to be resent thus creating more lag. Great for LAN parties, coming soon from the same vendor, I presume.
That seems a little... ridiculous. What are we going to see next, ATI insisting their new card is 10x more capable than the average onboard graphic processor?
They performed the "tests" on the company's machines. What a joke.
Can it run Linux?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Anandtech has a much better review here: Linky: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2865
I don't see any benchmarks in that article. Here are some,, and they don't make the thing look all that impressive.
The only benefit in this thing, apparently, is that, for games which make too many "select()" polls, there's a faster no-data return. This is really a bug in the game, which ought to be multi-threaded by now. As games are revised for multi-core systems, this problem had better go away. In fact, it probably will go away in Vista, which has a multithreaded network stack.
Maybe where this NIC really belongs is on the MMORPG *servers*?
Exactly how much is latency reduced by this card?
http://outcampaign.org/
It seems a like a lot of what this NIC claims to do (offloading TCP work such as checksumming and segmentation) can be done by an Intel NIC on Windows and Linux (2.6.19 and up at least). So go get a gig Intel NIC for the $35 and invest the rest in a new mouse pad or something that might actually impact your gaming a bit more than that silly nic. http://shopping.yahoo.com/p:Intel%20PRO%2F1000%20P T%20Desktop%20Adapter:1993037566;_ylt=Apu.Yd0SJ9f3 4z.56feYYLIbFt0A;_ylu=X3oDMTBic2hxMGNhBGx0AzQEc2Vj A3Ny?clink=dmps/intel_pro.2f.1000_pt/ctx=mid:5,pid :1993037566,pdid:5,pos:2,spc:14489115,date:2006120 9,srch:kw,x:
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
These kinds of "professional" gamers could use a fancy NIC with lower times. Or if your Richie Rich and you need some extras for your already pimped out gaming rig.
Anandtech article is FAR more extensive, listing actual benchmarks, test setup, etc.
How long until we have botnets made up of these things?
http://outcampaign.org/
It's not like a computer sends you some data and the network card is immediately able to reply. To formulate a response, it probably needs data from the CPU, e.g. about your position, your health, or whatever it is that you need to transfer back and forth in a game.
An ICMP echo reply is totally different though. Unless you have a weird firewall setup going on, it's pretty much just safe to send out the echo response as soon as you get the echo request. So in this situation, you could peg the main CPU and then have the NIC doing the mind numbingly boring task of sending out echo responses without going through the CPU, and in this case you might see a latency improvement of a few milliseconds. But in general the CPU is going to have to do some processing and formulate the correct response anyway, so having a "smart" network card doesn't help.
#include ".signature"
Hey, Here's an idea: If you don't think it's worth $250 DON'T BUY IT! It's not a hard concept to grasp, I know I myself had a problem with that at one point when I was younger. Stop your bitching and STFU!
While overpriced for a NIC, it also has the side effect of having its own onboard RAM and reprogrammable (400mhz) processor. Thus making it possible to plug a USB hard drive into the back of the card, run a bittorrent client with its onboard proceesor, and never use a single cpu cycle.
That alone for some people would be worth it.
Server systems have been using high quality NICs which offload network processing for years. Decades even... I think $250 is a bit steep. But then I'm not a l33t gamer. Kudos to them if they can get people to pay $250 for a $50 server NIC. I call that good marketing.
Of course they also need to be running 15,000rpm SCSI drives on a decent SCSI HBA as well as a top of the line CPU and loads of RAM and top of the range graphics card.
Deleted
From TFA:
That is just idiotic.
If you aren't going to do it right, then you are doing it WRONG. So it did NOT "reflect what would happen in real world gaming situations".
Again, you script it. You do not play it.
I'll give the KillerNIC people this, they certainly know how to pick their suckers.
Seriously. They didn't even bring their own PC's? They used the "testing machines" provided for them. And they think this has anything to do with "real world" performance?
A far, far better test, even under these biased conditions, would have been for them to use their own PC's. It cannot be that difficult to swap a NIC, can it?
In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
For some strange reason, all I ever see in these "reviews" are the KillerNIC people insisting that the games be run on THEIR machines. And people who are "reviewing" it accepting this strange requirement. And not even scripting it so that they can compare it with their home machines.
What happens is that your rockets get loaded a truck and an internet delivers those trucks to the server, its faster because your rockets are traveling en-mass.
Senator Ted Stephens started a rumor claiming that "the internet is not a big truck, its a series of tubes" dont listen to him, we all know rockets cant fly down tubes, they cant even steer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
Ooo, another processing unit to help out the "central" one with heavy mathematical computations! Let's see, we have the CPU, of course, the GPU, the DSP on the expensive sound card, myself, tagging along with my calculator and now the NPU! We're getting fast here.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Is not how does it compare against an onboard NIC, but how does it compare against a good NIC that does offloading, like an Intel server NIC? I mean $100 will get you Intel's copper 1000mbps server NIC which does support offloading of various functions and, unlike the killer NIC, has rock solid drivers (not just for Windows either). My bet? The Intel NIC probably does near as good a job, and doesn't have any problems, as well as saving you $150.
Comparing it only to cheap onboard NICs really isn't useful. I mean yes I'd be interested to know if it's better but the real question is if it's better than a high quality addon NIC that's already available.
Bigfoot allowed us to barge into their offices on a beautiful Saturday morning with real gamers in tow.
I'm calling bullshit on this article until they perform their tests someplace other than on the card manufacturer's network.
While Weird Al is waxing his modem to make it go faster, I've found that cheetah blood rubbed on a network card will significantly reduce latency.
CPU, FPU, GPU, PhysixPU, NPU...
What's next, OPU? One Processor to Rule Them All (TM)?
I ping from my router to my ISP and get and average of 30ms ping, I do the same from my computer and get 31ms ping. I'm intrigued to know how it can possibly increase my latency without making some modification to my router to make it communicate faster with the exchange which let's face it, is practically impossible.
Of course they could claim my router is the bottleneck but then, seeing as it's impossible for me to get an ethernet port connected directly to some internet backbone then I have no use for this card anyway.
More to the point however, this is around the 4th time this has been posted on Slashdot, not another "Slashdot repeated news postings whine" but more intrigued to know who this KillerNIC company is paying to keep getting their lies spread all over the internet?
If you see this and ponder buying this card for your game servers first try optimizing the Linux kernel. 1000 Hz ticks, big kernel lock preemption and other latency patches actually does wonders to ping times (and I do not mean ICMP echo or similar but ping packets answered by the game) and latency.
Many games have their own interesting capabilities for performance tuning. For instance Counter Strike 1.6 has the -pingboost setting which will switch between select() and alert() syscalls (10 ms reduction) or processing a frame for every packet. Other games have similar tuning options that will enhance performance. Then there's also tuning your network settings.
By the way, as far as I remember this Killer NIC is just some kind of offload engine. How *exactly* does this increase performance when most game specific packets are simple UDP packets that performance-wise are not as demanding as TCP packets (less checksums, no window scaling and other options easily tunable etc.)?
:/- spoon(_).
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
...can it lower /. refresh times?
I feel some first post karma coming my way...
In all the "reviews" of this that get posted here, I notice a few recurring items.
One of the most interesting to me is that they want the "gamers" to test the NIC as part of their entire box. But the real gamers would already have a box built to their specs that they were familiar with
Yet the "gamers" never seem to insist that they be allowed to compare the KillerNIC in their own box, against their existing NIC. And if they're serious gamers, they've already spent money replacing the on-board NIC if their motherboard came with it.
Kind of like if a tire company wants you to like new tires, but they won't let you drive them on your own car. You have to use their car. And you have to compare it to a different car that they have without the tires. And people accept that.
Under those conditions, I can show you improved ping times using nothing more than cool stickers for your case.
...I would buy a multiport server NIC.
I am not sure if someone already said this in this discussion. Lower ping times can be achieved if you abuse the implementation of TCP in your network stack. If your TCP implementation do not backoff upon congestion detection, you will starve other TCP flows but your latency will reduce.
I have no relationship with the company whatsoever, yet I can testify that this hardware works. I proved it to myself after I slapped four of these babies into my iMac and watched my level 13 die twice as fast in Ashenvale!
only noobs with no skill will buy this card, the pros know how to play with the lag
The $500 shoes worn by the professional will not be the same as the $500 shoes purchased by the average person. For one thing, the professional is paying for the technology and customization. The average person is paying for the marketing and endorsements.
That being said, the professional would NOT compare two shoes provided by a shoe company and "tested" on their own track.
S/He would compare them to his/her CURRENT favourite shoes on his/her current training track.
And that is where every single one of these KillerNIC "reviews" fails. It is not that difficult to swap a NIC. Yet the "testing machines" are always different. And none of the "reviewers" seem to be able to script a game. Or setup a test network with a test game server.
The "professional" in this case would setup a test network, with a test game server and a sniffer to see what is happening "on the wire" and script the game on his/her favourite machine with his/her current NIC.
Then the "professional" would swap the NIC's and re-set everything and run the script to see what difference/improvements there were.
It's not that difficult and it's not that expensive and yet not a single "review" of this "KillerNIC" seems to be able to do that.
Sure, you can pay $500 for shoes that were hand stitched by virgins under the light of a full moon with thread blessed by the Pope. And they may perform better than this other pair of shoes I'll give you to run in.
But in the end, you'd still be paying for the marketing of un-tested technology.
didn't you see the anandtech review back in October? this card is crap. http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2865&p=11
Running "ping -t host" from a command shell on an idle box isn't really representative of what we're dealing with here.
However, that said my personal feelings are that 10-20ms reduction in ping times is a "meh" improvement and that the claims of smoother gameplay are more of a placebo effect than anything else. Take the $250 and invest it in some other hardware.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Does it run linux..? Yes it does! And you can even open a shell and write programs for it.
Unfortunately, that setup has a lot of BANDWIDTH, but terrible latency (the latency is basically how long it takes for the station wagon to get to its destination).
My bicyles
Believing these marketing claims is "killer stupidity" and actually emptys wallets!
This is certainly something I've never encountered, I'm pretty sure networking code isn't so far down the priority chain in most engines that this is the case, netcode isn't something so processor intensive that there isn't room for it - if your machine is struggling to parse incoming packets and build outgoing packets then you're not going to have much fun anyway because your machine will be having even more trouble trying to render to screen.
This is even more the case in online games where if anything your GPU is going to be the bottleneck, the CPU likely wont have to worry about AI or even complex physics as a client - that'll be upto the server for the most part leaving plenty of room for the CPU to handle networking which again only uses an absolute minority of processing time in comparison.
I could beleive the information about the card more if it exposed an API such that the card would handle encryption and decryption of packets for games and so forth as well but it doesn't even do that afaik - application level encryption/decryption of packets alone is more CPU intensive than building/parsing TCP/UDP packets.
More to the point, with physics cards becoming available or alternatively physics being handled by graphics cards it's beginning to free up the CPU even more, with multiple cores the CPU can do more again so it really does lower the value of this NIC yet more, networking just isn't an area that needs moving offboard - building say, dedicated AI hardware would've been a far superior option.
Anybody here get better than an honest 100mbs from their ISP?
It would seem to me that your online connection speed would be the real bottleneck.
My $180 gaming router does that already. I have noticed less lag in games sense I got a gaming router. It has a QOS feature that gives games and VOIP priority over all other internet communications.
how does this compare to toe nics in the market (alacritech, adaptec)?
how does this compare to the technology of intel's i/o acceleration technology?
from anandtech's benchmarks, the killer nic did not do that much of a different in latency. in the transfer of data, it is even slower and has a high cpu utilization.
however, this is a new product and may suffer from bad driver implementation/immature product. we may see some improvements in the future.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Including the requirement to reactivate the operating system? Windows Vista is said to have tighter requirements than Windows XP.
...from what I've gathered from the comments (of course I didn't RTFA).
* The card supports the standard packet processing offloading that higher-end NICs have for years.
* The card can act as a firewall, which enables the user to turn of all software firewalls.
It seems to me, one could just buy a $50 broadband router or build their own mono0wall/ipcop router, and throw in a $20 3c905 card and get the same results for a lot less money.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Bigfoot Networks and Anandtech both say that one of the ways it improves performance is by bypassing the Windows (or other OS) TCP/IP stack. How does it do this? How does the OS know where to route the incoming and outgoing packets if the stack has been bypassed?
I did this my rerouting the main deflector through a positronic matrix. Zero latency, baby!
I recall reading a technical overview of this card a few months back. Apparently, it's running Linux of some sort on its host processor. So, how awesome would it be if some remote vulnerability affected the card, allowing someone to implant a rootkit on the device? Now all of your raw network traffic can be captured, your machine can be joined to a botnet, etc. and you'll probably have absolutely no way of knowing about it.
Granted, most people that will use this NIC (the few who do) probably aren't communicating a whole lot of sensitive data. Still, the whole thing just looks like a disaster waiting to happen.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
...you might also want the Killer Ethernet Cable.
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
If you think you need one of these learn2play. No amount of hardware will overcome your shortcomings.
Wait this is exactly who this is aimed for, those with shortcomings in another department....
http://hardware.gotfrag.com/portal/story/34683/
The benchmarking starts on page 5.
There is hardware, software and internet induced latency. The best a NIC can do is improve hardware induced latency. However that is the least of it. The main thing to worry about is how to reduce the amount of time the software spends processing packet information. There's little you can do about internet latency. Every ms spent rendering the screen is an ms that causes packets to get backed up.
I wrote a client/server app that had to deal with a rediculous amount of information about hundreds of entities moving around the screen. I found the most efficient way to keep messages being processed was to lock the framerate at 30fps and drop frames if that rate could not be maintained. When a frame is dropped the only thing that doesn't happen is that a frame doesn't get rendered. Suddenly the main look is running at thousands of iterations per second clearing out messages from the queue and processing them because it doesn't have to render a frame for a few ms. 30 ms of focused message processing will reduce lag significantly.
If I put the emphasis on rendering frames per second the message queue would back up and eventually the app would crash because the buffer was filling up faster than it could empty it.
Maybe instead of focusing on rendered frames per second, people should be putting more emphasis on iterations per second and getting those messages processed. At 100 fps that give 10ms to render a frame, process all the waiting messages, and perform game logic. Good luck with that. 10ms is barely enough time to just render a frame.
I bet gamers would have a better on-line experience if they'd lock the rendered frame rate to free up more processing power to handle packets. However, I don't think any modern games allow that. Locking the frame rate typically means locking the entire game processing loop and that's stupid and unnecesary. It is possible to not render a frame but still do everything else.
Work Safe Porn
Honestly, the latency difference is going to be _zero_ for a UDP packet (the protocol that every game I know of uses) and at best one millisecond or so for something like ICMP. It is _not_ going to be 10 ms. To restate what I've already posted elsewhere, if you need to go to the CPU for information about what information is encoded in the packet anyway, the 10 _micro_seconds it takes your CPU to read the header off of a UDP packet is not going to matter. A UDP packet literally has, at most, four fixed width fields, and no options. You do not need a NIC to parse that for you.
#include ".signature"
At least server NICs work well. You get an Intel server NIC and you aren't going to have problems. That shit is stable, both the hardware and software. This thing is for crap from what I can tell. Driver problems left and right. So you aren't overpaying for a server NIC, you are overpaying for a bad imitation of a server NIC.
His userid is really 5 and I can barely frag him with teht fancy rig and apartment selected for it's proximity to the tournament server. Up to his nefarious tricks, he once again uses the absolute value of reverse psychology to propogate this rumor of a 'contrived testamonial' to ensure that everyone sees through the killernic gimmick and doesn't compete on a level playing field with him. If he actually had any skillz, he'd be dangerous. This guy is why they invented the deagle.
So, according to TFA, this card is supposed to reduce lag/latency. The big question for me is this: will it make any difference if the server you're trying to play on is having trouble? I know that 90% of the lag I get is caused by low bandwidth on the server side, not the NIC on my end. I know that, in theory, this reduces the time it takes to send/receive the packets on your end, but in cases where you have (noticeable) lag in the first place, it shouldn't make much difference unless it can somehow reduce the size of the packets or somehow bump your packets up on the server list. I guess that you'll be slightly ahead of the competition even in cases of bad lag, but when you have very bad lag to the point where the other players are jumping around the screen, I see no reason why this would help you.
Maybe as a card to help you out on already very expensive/fast servers, but for most servers you play on every day this won't help you.
Of course, the people who play on "normal" servers aren't the target market anyway; this card is for the elites who have private servers set up for them and their elite buddies.
This is not a sig. This is a llama-duck. Quack.
The story only talks about "perceived" improvements, purely from a persons perspective while playing.
This is the worst story ever. No factual data has been given to support the writers opinion.
A human being will unlikely perceive the difference between a 50 and a 60ms ping. Only the human ear can distinguish events that close apart in time, but I doubt that even an experienced gamer would be able to tell how high his ping is even in clean situations.
Why not do a double-blind test with multiple test subject? That would have been at least a fair discussion of how people perceive performance in a marginal field like this.
This article is horrible, absolutely rock-bottom. What a FUD.
Back in the heyday of Quake II, me and a friend who made the Quake Superheroes and Quake Superheroes II mods put in a superpower that would (ostensibly) reduce your ping time, using some kind of technobabble handwaving. Everyone was convinced that it worked, too, because when you used it, the ping times listed in the player screen would indeed be lower for you!
:) I don't know if anyone ever caught on, but it was funny watching people argue over whether you should take a "real" superpower like flying or teleportation, or try to improve your ping :)
What almost no one knew was that the mod API allowed you to simply edit those values on the fly.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Read what the card does before nay-saying. It goes like this, the Windows TCP stack is *so* bad (how bad is it??) that by running a network stack in a dedicated little linux distro and handing the pre-chewed packets to the PCI bus, you actually get faster throughput than if windows handled the packets.
While there's a small advantage in offloading the processing load, the real edge is that Linux has a much more effecient network stack than that of windows.
This leaves one wondering how much more performance improvement we could get by tearing away more and more functions from this sad OS or just installing a better OS from the begining.
(Free advice to game makers, save your customers the $200 and put out a Linux version first.)
I write NPU code for a living. When I first heard about this card I thought "Hey great! A cheap pci card with an NPU on it that I can use for something useful". When I read the technical details on it and discovered it's not really an NPU at all it became suddenly less exciting. Yawn.
The Killer is a transport offload engine. The TCP protocol has a bunch of things that could be offloaded, etc.
:-) In the case of Linux and *BSD, that's a negative out of the
The processing of CRC calculations, framing in the TCP headers, computing the congestion avoidance, etc. takes CPU cycles.
For every inbound or outbound packet, there's a price in CPU use. On a heavily loaded machine, it "might" make a difference.
For example, it can take up to 80% or more of the CPU's total available cycles to handle the peak bandwidth of a 10G ethernet
adapter if you've even got a bus fast enough to handle that fat a pipe. A TOE would be used to bring that back down out of
the stratosphere to something more manageable. However, it doesn't come without a price. Using a TOE, you circumvent the
bulk of the network security present in the OS and put it in the hands of the TOE vendor and their stack. In the case
of MS products, some might consider that to be a plus...
gate. However, it can and does work decently in the 10G ethernet space, so, for things like supercomputer clusters or as
something like an iSCSI channel adapter, they work pretty well. Not perfect, but they work well enough that it's worth
considering something like an iWARP channel adapter for certain specific applications. Keep in mind, however, that Transport
Offload typically only gets used with TCP or iSCSI because there's things that CAN gain by being offloaded- UDP only has
checksum and little else that realistically can be offloaded, and most decent NICs already DO this for you if their driver's
been set up to do so.
Is it snake oil? Perhaps. Is it a waste of money? Probably.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Network-layer, Deering-model multicast is never going to happen. It has nothing to do with ISP business models and everything to do with simple technical feasibility:
There isn't even an agreement among protocol designers about what multicast is supposed to accomplish anymore. BitTorrent is taking a lot of the steam out of it; so are unicast solutions to streaming media that prove that multicast is inessential. Multicast gets used tactically inside of some networks, but if you're on the same LAN as your other players, the network is already plenty fast for gaming even with unicast.
Forget about multicast.
When KillerNIC was first featured on Slashdot, there were many great comments. Do get yourself informed by the limitations of the card and the various bottlenecks that will make this card useless.
w00t
Some people are used to writing for the 1.8 inch columns of typical newspaper layout, which does use more paragraph breaks than copy elsewhere because 25 to 35 words fill an inch. The 25em column width of Slashdot's comment entry area before the CSS makeover encouraged similar behavior.
this is what you call a crock-of-shit. it reminds me of the honda civics with huge carbon fiber spoilers. once i saw a civic with a nismo sticker on it. this nic actually induced the same amount of nausea, in fact i was so angry, that when i was done smashing things my eyes were bleeding. my bloodpressure mustve soared, i cant remember though i blacked out during the rage. needless to say, this product does not get my stamp of approval.
I just connected a bunch of these together and actually got negative latency! I was actually seeing what the other players were doing before they even did it, which allowed me to kick everyone's ass easily. I highly recommend this card (be sure to buy several).
Would be to ignore the NIC, but do a blind test of a FPS on identical equipment, always identify the machine being used by the losing party as the old-and-busted hardware, then watch these ass-jockey "gamerz" get into a circle-jerk agreeing with it every time. Then repeat the test but actually introduce the infinitesimal latency these guys can supposedly detect...but report it as only on the winning machine and enjoy watching the same circle-jerk.
"...the hardcore online gamer is exactly who this product is targeted at."
Except the hardcore gamers are the ones who have a clue and are laughing at these guys.
I agree, its a bit of a stretch - however I *have* seen ping times on a machine go to shit when the cpu was hung up on something else. Admittedly, this was several years ago on Pentium 1 class hardware with a crappy realtek card. :D
But yes, I agree with you that it's fairly pointless. Take the $250 and buy a quicker cpu, next model up video card, etc... if there's no faster hardware for you to purchase (for gaming), well... you already wasted your money IMHO. Obviously business users who need the fastest gear they can get at whatever price are different - but that's not who this card is aimed at...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The Maximum PC review says that it does work but only added about a 3ms improvement. But the improvement was consistant. The ability to offload other cpu affecting programs to the custom linux kernel would add a bit more benefit.. especially if you can run programs like roger wilco (or whatever that chat thing is) on it.
This does not only target the hardcore internet gamer, but also the hardcore internet wannabe-gamer, namely your average 15 year old.
Oh yes, this network card is used by progamers, hence using it will make you a progamer! It's that simple!
Do not trust this signature.
I used a 486DX 33Mhz as a Linux router (2x 3Com ISA NIC) for some time. I could download a file from the internet at 650kb/s through it.
How hard could it be for today's about 100x times faster CPUs to deal with game traffic that is probably somewhere in the 5-20kb/s range?
Seriously, if your CPU is that slow that it cannot handle game traffic, a 250$ NIC probably isn't the wisest upgrade option.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The thing that attracted me to this card from the beginning was it's pricetag. ITS A CHEAP-ASS DEVELOPMENT CARD! I literally was looking at an MPC8349 Dev board from Freescale ($1500, no sh**), and found this puppy had a freescale embedded proc,with linux, with windows and linux drivers... so i'm off to the races for under $250, and enjoying every second of it. I expect i will make my project into an fnapp, cause i suspect gamers care about a micro-web-server, to run micro-transactions... lol but very cool dev system for the price for sure.