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General: AGC: Bigfoot Networks
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Jon Wood was thrown a bit out of his element at AGC when he met with the folks at Bigfoot Networks to talk about their lag reducing network card.
| Conferences like the one that we attended in Austin arent always about games, sometimes its about hardware. Now, I have to say up front that hardware isnt really my thing. Some days Im lucky if I know how the computer runs, and what RAM is. Ok, Ive over-stating myself a little bit here, but lets just say that its not my area of expertise.
On Friday, I had the chance to sit down with the guys from Bigfoot Networks to talk about their newest product: The Killer Network Interface Card. Ive seen their ads around the web and they made me curious. Ive got to say though, that even though I thought it looked cool, I wasnt sure what it was for. Then, they really cleared it up for me with one word. Lag. |
You can read more here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Cool, thanks. I have a Killer NIC (due to ads on this site hehe). I am fairly happy with it so far, I hate raiding though, so I guess I'll never see 41% improvments anywhere! I'm just glad to be free of using my Nvidia onboard POS (what business does Nvidia have making a NIC?!).
Prettty much: if Killer NIC is problem free for it's lifetime, then I will be happy with it. I will fall in love with it if I get better performance in UT2K7 (if it ever comes out), ladder matches from Canada can be pretty lame when people live in Dallas beside the server and my ping is 80+ (I'm much less effective than I should be at 70+).
As much as this thing costs it better kill my lag entirely, make my breakfest, walk my dog, and wash my car too.
3 words: Waste of money.
It's cool because it's got a fully programmable PowerPC chip onboard with hardware level access to ip packets before they get to the stack. If you don't know why that is cool, you don't need it.
total and utter BS, glad to know MMORPG has sold out. Lower your ping and up your FPS?!? That is the biddest load of crap I have ever read.
No currently sold NIC will lower you ping better than any other and no NIC will up your FPS any more than offloading the NIC from the motherboard thereby giving you more RAM, FPS is all about the video card not the NIC.
If you have money to burn, get yourself a better router and or firewall instead of wasting money on this load of horse dung
People here talk about it like that they know everything about FPS and Network Cards.
FPS doesn't entirely depend on your video card, if it did, then how come you lag more when you are in a raid?
If it does depend on your video card, then it should perform the same in every situation.
Lag can be caused by many different reasons, one of them is your video card no doubt. However, server performance as well as network lag are also similar reasons.
I am not sure how a new Network Card can improve the lag issue. But, I am not going to pre-judge a Card without reading a proper review or by experiencing it myself. Who knows, it might really work. They may have written some high performance firmware algorithms to specially deal with the lag issue.
Originally posted by Jon Wood
You don’t have to be a hardware guru to see that, if the card holds up
to its reviews and hype, it has the potential to make online gaming a
less frustrating experience for all involved.
Exactly, if you are a hardware guru (or just only a competent guy that knows how hardware and drivers are supposed to work) and you read the KN whitepapers, the most you can get from the Card is a good laugh, no more, no less.
The 41% statement about FPS gain is laughable, since most of the packet juggling on modern CPUs is pretty low and if you happen to have a decent network card all your packets are already offloaded by hardware.
Oh wait. WOW is the game that has problem with packet offloading so that at the start many users were told to disable it, due to some questionable anti cheating practice that broke the stricter (and safer) TCP/UDP parsing made by hardware. I smell a custom made module to avoid the protocol issues and re-enable packet offloading... Nevertheless, it is still too much, performance wise. Not even the worst NIC in the world can drop 40% of your performances in network-heavy situations.
A 10% gain is more believable but still highly far-fetched.
The 9ms ping gain is realistic, but once again, we are talking of a game that for unknown reasons can ping as up as 1000ms even in instances... +/- 9ms cannot save your day (and your monthly fees).
I'd like to see how well it can ping with a ping-dependant game like CS:S. But, let me re-iterate that even in CS:S a ping 9ms lower than usual is almost unperceived by a human being. My average sessions with CS:S pings from 30 to 50ms, no way a NIC can grant me -9ms, it would mean they were able to remove several hops in the internet between me and the server where I play (9 ms and I am halfway to my server, according to tracert).
Once again, I doubt to see such a huge (system-wise) increase in low-ping games.
You nay sayers and wannabe techies need to do your research.
Ive read many independent reviews from legitimate tech sites.
I suggest you do the same before you start making claims of what is BS and what isnt.
I'm not a hardware guru, but even I find the claimed improvements hard to believe.
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Yes but it is impossible for their card to do what it claims. A $30 network card will do the exact same thing this card will do. You can not decrease network latency on the end user side. This card would only benefit in situations where the data pipeline is > 100Mbps. Currently no internet connection for consumer use is that fast and as such you will not lower your latency by buying this card.
FPS is mostly Video Card related with a small percentage being CPU related. Offloading an onboard NIC does negligible boosts to a CPU's performance. Nothing near to what this card claims.
Then there is the limitations of PCI bus speeds meaning a gigabit NIC on a PCI slot can never utilize the full spectrum of its bandwidth.
All in all this company is blow smoke up people's asses and should be called on it at every turn.
God I hope these selllouts don't do a new review of maple story.
It's better be hated for who you are, than loved for who you aren't.
