Slashdot Mirror
'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."
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
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?
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?
I suspect it will produce a noticeable improvement in situations where your computer is running heavily loaded. If you're playing a game that keeps your cpu pegged or near most of the time, your latency will be noticeably higher because of that (using the typical network card, which is a bit 'winmodemish' in that it's relying on the cpu to do much of its work.) So having a card that does all the network processing itself, without relying on the CPU, would avoid that slowdown.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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!
It requires a fiber-optic cable because it needs to be able to send the photons in a superposition of states. By the time your program gets around to sending a packet, the photons are most of the way there and merely need to collapse into the same state as the packet. The naysayers who claim that the card can't actually improve latency are only thinking in terms of classical physics.
Badass Resumes
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.
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.
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*?
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
Clearly you didn't read the review. The card works.
Maybe you shouldn't accept everything you read on wikipedia as scientific fact.
Badass Resumes
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.
Strange, that FP is actually ontopic.... AC's and their bigfoot cards.
Yeah, you definitely need to have a Cisco router with Monster Cable CAT 6 running between it and your computer to make full use of Gigabit. Anything less and you're dropping packet fidelity through crosstalk line expansion. Not to mention the undervoltage latencies.
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!
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.
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.
Can you list a few examples, preferably with datasheets?
Here are two datapoints. A $10 PCI NIC, and a $100 mobo I bought lately (with an integrated NIC) feature checksum offloading. They are both GBit, so I guess you get that for free on any GBit NIC nowadays.
Other than that, I really don't see how a NIC can decrease latencies. The latency of that first hop off your computer is below 1ms anyways.
Most games are GPU-bound anyways. And most games are single threaded. Add it up, and you find that most people who can afford a $250 NIC have CPU power to spare (most likely dual core, too). Therefore, it'd be useful if you were on a budget system, but at $250, you would almost always spend that on the GPU or RAM.
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.
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(_).
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.
Actually, I found some more info on this after I made that post, and it's pretty interesting. Apparently there's more to it. First, they're bypassing the windows networking stack entirely, and that gives a measurable latency decrease. Second, the card is actually a linux machine on a card, so it runs a firewall and the windows drivers disable the windows firewall, and that gives another significant speed boost.
;)
Of course, all this presumes you're running windows to begin with, so it's useless to me. But for those so afflicted, perhaps a small subset are hyper sensitive to lag enough to make the thing be worth it. And it sounds interesting to me for other reasons - couldn't you stick a hard drive in directly attached to it and run bittorrent on your NIC?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
...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.
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?
Speed != Latency.
Latency is the time it takes to go from one object to another
Speed is MB/S or some other equivalent measure
If speed was latency, we'd hire freight trains to carry cars full of hard drives to the intended recipient rather than measly packets over wire.
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
The secret is that the card comes with a very noticable "Type R" sticker for your case. That alone can improve performance by 12.3% across the board.
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
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.
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.
Amazingly, yes.
The 'Killer' sends packets so strong that any congestion encountered along the way gives up its place in the queue. Utilising the unique HellGain (TM) technology, pulses are transmitted with more energy than other NICs
Also, for those using half-duplex on hub ports, there's the CollisionKiller (TM) feature. When collisions are detected, your card keeps transmitting, but one-louder. Depending on the congestion on the segment, up to 500V could be present at the connector.
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
In Linux, type "ethtool -k eth0" to see if your card does it. Many systems I use have onboard Intel controllers and they all support it.
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.
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.