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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."
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
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!
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
25 years and counting, they still haven't caught me. :-)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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.
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.
You're wrong on somethings..
i to_doc/qos.htm
1) bunch of blah and stuff about memory. Since your explanation is memory->application->CPU->kernel memory->protocol stack->CPU memory->NIC driver->bus (basically, it was hard to follow with all the fud), you obviously have no idea how an OS works (I can't think of any modern, common OS's that have such a path). None of this happens as you describe, they are all parts, but the flow is nothing like you describe. See LKML for 2.6 on network programming if you want to see how this works on Linux, which is relatively transparent http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/17/78 also you can look at BSD.
2) The PCI Bus is irrelevant for gigabit ethernet (which is about the only network controller commonly in production, legacy stuff like 10/100 is more common- but is almost out of production) and for faster types (10GE or myrinet or infiniband), totally irrelevant. The 32bit PCI bus limit is about at gigabit speeds, and it is shared with everything else on the PCI bus- therefore suboptimal:
http://www.codepedia.com/1/PCI+BUS
PCI-X and gigabit controllers directly off the Controller chipsets is how networking is mostly done now.
3) blah blah, network slower than computers (ridiculous depends on the network and computer exclusively- in consumer computers it swings in a pendulum, when 100Mb came out most of the stuff in the PC couldn't keep up- it was faster to install over the network than from CD ROM because the CD drive was slower, it is going through that again with gigabit- most consumer PCs disk systems can't even approach filling gigabit). Then some conflation about what QoS, and policing can do... QoS only helps if the pipe is full:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service
or
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/
4) ISP and stupidity. ISP's may or may not be stupid. They are driven by market forces and the market force is people don't currently want to pay for a tiered service class internet. When they do, they will offer it. Technically it has been feasible for years. Read NANOG mailing list, you will see they are not stupid, but instead are in a low margin business.
5) blah blah blah, microsecond delay, destinguishable from millisecond via a consumer computer with a common OS by a person?? hahahahah. not without a measuring device. It is possible with enough training (I suppose musicians can). Since you can buy commodity off the shelf lan gear that will turn in sub millisecond delay, I don't think spending the extra-money on low microsecond delay will help
Bunch of pseudo-science modded up on Slash again...
Oh and Jumbo FRAMES are commonly 9000B in size (although the term can refer to anything bigger than 1500B:
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/net/jumbo/
or 9K on cisco:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/148.html