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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."
It is the in-game "ping", not ICMP. In most games this includes the RTT for traversing the game own network API all the way to the event loop, through the event loop and back.
1. Anything that can interface at a higher API level compared to the normal Winhoze network stack it is likely to reduce application level round trip.
2. The results will be more pronounced on a more loaded system.
3. If you read till the end of the article the NIC is actually an embedded Linux system so you can turn off your winhoze firewall completely and let Linux do the firewalling.
Overall: 3 alone on a heavily loaded system will give seriously improved application response rates and not just for gaming. 2 and 3 can boost that even further and allow applications that are not feasible under windows. F.E. winhoze sucks rotten eggz as far as Layer 3 based HA, anicast and routing and this will allow you to bolt on that on top of a Winhoze application by running a routing protocol stack on the embedded engine. In fact there is a lot of non-gaming potential in this thing.
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"I call that good marketing."
I call it theivery and extortion, just as the *AA's of the world hate piracy, we consumers hate being gouged. It's theft either way you slice it.