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'Killer' Network Card Actually Reduces Latency

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i'll-be-a-monkey's-uncle dept.

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."

3 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Holy shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Wow, this 'article' is a real gem.
    This more recent fast moving game was used by Keith, our software tester from Dell. He reported ping times during his Killer NIC session to be about 10ms faster on the server that was returning 50 to 70ms pings with the onboard NIC. When quizzed about a discernible difference in Q4 session quality, Keith did not express anything to us that really set one session off against the other. The Killer NIC and Quake 4 seemed to be a wash at best.
    I think that's the only time they actually note anything about "latency reduction" in this advert. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find all the flaws in this testing methodology. What is even more amazing, given the other 3 accounts do not give any confirmation whatsoever is that they come to the most ridiculous conclusion.
    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....
    Paid product placement at its finest I suppose. But even the vetted boys at HardOCP realized they would have to blow some reality up everyone's ass after all that smoke, and added the following to be "fair and balanced."
    ...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.
  2. Re:How ... by TodMinuit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How can a NIC decrease the latency in any noticable way?

    You'd be surprised what marketers can do.

    --
    I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
  3. Where are the benchmarks? by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.