[citation][nom]dansergiu[/nom]I don't get it. Either this article is lacking crucial information or it simply states false information. How exactly am I going to reduce lagging using this card while BitTorrents are still running. Every BitTorrent client tries to make as many TCP connections as possible for maximum bandwidth. That's a fact. This card has a separate processing unit and can handle audio. So? does it make sure that I get a dedicated bandwidth for my application (read game)? I don't think so. All it does is take some processing out of the CPU but it also installs a driver in the OS, interrupts and synchronization with the CPU and Northbridge. So you actually reliving less processing from the CPU than you may think. But the BitTorrent client still tries to take as much bandwidth as possible. Nothing stops him from doing that. This card is completely garbage. Don't buy it. This is false marketing and Bigfoot tries to sell it's stupid cards at very high prices just so people would think they are actually worth anything.[/citation]
Dansergui, this is actually the most favorite post I've had to answer today - we're catching up on a week's worth of news here after a very successful GDC. But I digress - you posted the most interesting question of the last week!
They way we do this is straightforward. (I almost said simple, but the engineers would kill me.) By assigning each process a separate priority in hardware bandwidth control, you can ensure that your game (or your voice chat, or your streaming music) gets the highest priority in your network.
Our founder and CTO uses this to literally strangle Windows Update, iTunes, Adobe updater, pretty much any non-gaming process, while prioritizing whatever voice package he's using and giving utmost priority to a game.
Last month I used this feature on the Killer NIC (our first-gen card) to download Dawn of War II via Steam while playing about 5 uninterrupted, awesome, lag-free hours of Day of Defeat. I assigned Priority 1 to hl2.exe and lowest priority to both Steam.exe and svchost.exe. I also leave my gaming machine in the DMZ on my router and use the hardware firewall in the card, but that's personal preference.
If I was a totally hardcore h4xx0r, I'd find a way to make Steam downloads go to the USB storage device that you can attach to the back of the card. As it is, that's where I put FTP and BitTorrent downloads. This way, the download never even touches the system bus, let alone my hard drive.
So there are two answers to this - yes, you can leave your torrent client hungry, and let him try to open as many connections as he likes. However, by assigning him a lower priority than your game, you can ensure that your system plays your game first and downloads Ubuntu second.
Additionally, you can allocate bandwidth in our bandwidth control application, so that your torrent client only eats up a chunk of the available bandwidth.
Myself, I feel like if I'm paying for the 10Mbps down, I might as well use the whole 10Mbps - especially if I'm only using 128Kb down/up for the game that I'm playing, why not use the other stuff alongside it?
Thanks again for the question, and make sure to check out the website in the upcoming weeks for more information.