Interview: Bigfoot's Killer NIC, Exposed

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[citation][nom]Spacey123[/nom]So let's see, there's 0.2ms worth of latency from my computer to my router. There's 35 ms of latency from my computer to my favorite gaming server. Killer NIC is going to shave off how much? Seems to me there's only 0.2ms for it to work with...And CPU load? Good grief. A game is what, 128 kbit? Maybe 256kbit bidirectionally? My old 486-25 could handle 256kbit of 64 byte UDP packets without breaking a sweat. I'm supposed to believe offloading this from a modern CPU will have a notable effect?[/citation]

The proof is in the old toms article where they 'benchmarked' this card by setting two identical pc's next to each other and had two testers watch eachother's screens during a crysis level to try to get the players in the same places at the same time.......
 
your internet only go as fast as your slowest link in WAN. which mean unless u got completely crappy router and NIC (which hard to find nowaday) 99.9999% of time slowness come from outside router which beyond your control. and this NIC only improve in LAN party for best, beside.. there tons of program in the net you can change the windows package size tcp udp setting etc. as tomshardware reader, why would anyone pay extra 150$ for somthin you can get for free in fist place?

i'm not so sure who are they try to target as focus customer.. as hardcore gamer who build our own system most likely also know how to change window registry. and for those non-hardcore gamer they dont even care what NIC does as long as computer able connect to internet.

 
Well the price is killer !!! lol all joking aside this is one of those things I classify as "Monster Cable Syndrome" these items appeal to people who have tons of money and think they can buy something the average person cannot. It may or may not provide any benefit but the more you pay the better it works, or so the nuts claim... Mechanics have something close, I believe the one they have is "The more chrome it has the faster will go!!!"
 
the Killer Nic was a gread idea when i heard about it, then i wondered how much it really helped and what it offered.

I know the guys at bigfoot are trying to do the best on design and software, but the price is a the overhead cost of them selling one product at limited scale to a small audience.

Most of those people are informed about what to buy and do full review ratings before giving out cash.


Next time i am in austin which will be in 50 days, ill go visit Bigfoot (and AMD) and ask if they will give me a job!

if they turn me down then ill just go renew my library card for free !!!
 
Sad, but true, this card has not made much of a difference. The on board NICs, EVGA 680i SLI A1 revision motherboard, were just as good from what I have seen. Seems the only benefit is the blinky lights on the card, which are visible through the side of the case window. I was shocked to see that Vista 64 bit drivers were available.
 
I have a Killer NIC K1 card and have had it for ~18 months. It works.

Games are smoother, more responsive and generally have higher fps, even on occasions where the ping isn't reduced by a significant amount.

You guys aren't understanding what their claim is. Reducing your ping-time isn't the only goal, offloading networking from your CPU by bypassing the enormous amount of code in the Windows' networking stack is the goal.

I think the majority of you people are being deliberately dense so that you can naysay a product you haven't even tried.
 
rapture monkey...........im top drawer online player lol, i upgrade my rig every 6-8 months at large cost, the last one which had my killer nic in it i sold, i did not take the card out for my new build because it wasnt worth it, i did try and sell it on Ebay (twice) it did not make good money.
I will not be buying another one, i know enough about ping, lag and latency etc to write a freakin doctrate.
I been clan server admin and fps team captain for 6 years.
At least i have the nuts to sham my own product, which i paid for with my hard earned money, its just a shame your too embarrassed to do the same, maybe your wife is watching and if she finds out you bought crap you wont get let out the box again with the visa card?

lmao

Bottom line.........Killer Nic......duff product and wild unsubstantiated claims.....DONT BELIEVE THE HYPE!!

A QUICK NOTE TO TOMS STAFF

IF YOU GONE PAY LIP SERVICE TO NAFF PRODUCTS YOUR CREDIBILITY WILL SINK LIKE A STONE.
 
Here’s the best part: if a game company optimizes their game to make use of the GSA, then that game is also FURTHER optimized for the Killer NIC! More of the network processing, firewalling and other stuff gets offloaded into Killer and it is better integrated into the game as a result. Emergent Game Technologies is already shipping an entire Engine around the GSA and our SDK (called LLR2), and that’s just the one I can publicly announce. Many more are actively optimizing for the GSA because it will not only save them money on servers, it also gives everyone a lower lag experience whether you have a Killer NIC or not.
Click to expand...

Strange, this doesn't sound like an ad to me. He even agrees that there are three parts to reducing lag. It sounds like he knows his networking pretty darn well and is making a high end part for the most enthusiastic gamers. Who cares how much it costs? If you don't want to buy it, you don't have to.
 
couldn't this make everything slower? since with on board NIC your connection goes directly to your mobo then GPU vs going to the killer card(and it needs time and power to read/ interpret the signal then send it out) through the PCI to the motherboard and then your GPU to generate the graphics. If i am wrong let me know
 
[citation][nom]tvsocks[/nom]couldn't this make everything slower? since with on board NIC your connection goes directly to your mobo then GPU vs going to the killer card(and it needs time and power to read/ interpret the signal then send it out) through the PCI to the motherboard and then your GPU to generate the graphics. If i am wrong let me know[/citation]
Even on a 33mhz pci bus, its highly unlikely that your few cycles over the pci bus will cause a substantial lag on frames in the gpu. Mainly because they're not that closely related, but also because you're looking at frames that get updated only 100 times a second tops, as opposed to the pci bus which cycles 33,000,000 times a second.
If you're talking about latency, yes then it matters (slightly) but not because of trips to/from the gpu.
 
Once these reach $50 and PCI-E I'll get one. Until then, well, forget it.

I've been in computers and networking for a very long long time. I saw the degredation in performance on games and other network heavy tasks when Ethernet off-loading became the norm. Of course who could argue with a $10 network card back when we were used to paying $100 to $500 for a network card! But processor chips and computers in general have become so powerful, that the off-loading is basically un-noticable today. Bigfoot is correct in everything they say. But that still doesn't make it worth my time or money to change away from the dirt cheap method. There is no true bang for my buck here.

Here's what will truly make a difference:
1. Integrate the CPU and memory and support chips into a single chip for this design. This is what's keeping the price too high.
2. Once that's done, sell it everywhere: Make a much cheaper card. Sell it as on-board network for enthusiast motherboards. Put it in laptops!

This guy is good an engineering, that's great. Now stuff some business sense into him and he'll have a "must have" product. But, not until then.
 
A lot of people dont even read the article - everyone always jumps on the bandwagon of "Oh dur another promotion".

But what article do you even want? If its on an ATI card reviewing performance arent they in some extent doing the exact same thing? If they did it to a NVIDIA card its still promotion.

But a detailed article like this gives a good insight to what the car is and why. I learnt something on this page - this card may not be utterly useless. The windows networking stack is a piece of shit and often i am forced to dualboot into another OS to be able to get better pings for competitions. Bypassing the network stack would directly solve that problem.

Secondly - this is for the high end gamer. The gamer that has the best of everything so that nothing but skill can be held against him/her. That is - my PC is restricted by budget - my FPS drops sometimes or varies. Sometimes i wonder if my 1600DPI mouse isnt quite as precise as some of the 3000DPI mice.

And the same goes here - the price performance isnt good at all, but when you have the best available, this would give you a slight advantage. Actually put it this way - even if its small you would be at a disadvantage compared to someone who did have this. And at a competition level - is that even acceptable? With hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money on the line, this would appeal to you.

Of course - it probably doesnt appeal to YOU. Because those kinds of gamers arent trolling comments on tomshardware 😛

So..
 
Calling this a regular NIC and saying you get the same performance from an onboard 100/1000 CODEC is like comparing an onboard "3D accelerator" and a dedicated card. Those onboard chips use CPU cycles to handle packets, CPU cycles are also used to sort packets out and deliver them to the proper application (through Winsock). This is similar to onboard sound CODECs that use CPU cycles to produce sound vs the dedicated cards from creative and co. The list of comparisons is rather deep, we're in the age of specialization, where each function is being off loaded to a specialized hardware to release the CPU to do other things.

Having this card (and your app tweaked for it) will result in higher FPS just from the fact that your CPU is no longer handling the UDP packet streams to/from your game. Thats without taking into account how they changed the process from burst (wait till buffer is full then transmit) to stream (transmit the moment data arrives), which depending on network conditions could equate in a rather large performance boost.

Now all that being said, its not worth $150 bucks. Maybe once the price goes down a bit, and more games become optimized to use it. I see this like the Aegis PhysX engine, theoretically nice, but not practical .... yet.

*note*
If you using VoIP applications, then you will see an improvement in this, due to how all network traffic is normally bunched into a large buffer and is fed through your CPU one packet at a time.
 
interestingly most people who just say "screw you killer nic" seem not to have the deepest insight from a technological point of view... why? pinging your router won't give you a clue about the performance hit of the windows network stack... why? because icmp isn't udp... simple as that... but that's just an example... shure, it's easier to blame those bastard capitalists for just telling marketing crap than getting informed about the technological background behind all that... and it is a fact that the windows ip stack is nothing more than a snail... i can say so, because i'm actually playing WoW via wine under linux... guess what: playing WoW under win i have a ping around 100ms ore even more! playing under linux my ping in this game is around 20ms... most of the time it's under this value... no joke, try it, if you don't believe it...

that example given, most of you guys really should consider either shutting up or getting some knowledge of what's going on under the hood... and i really DON'T mean those beginers-crap like deactivating tcp offload engines, windows services or setting up some qos rules... it's about windows' ip stack.
 
you people forget the price tag of R/D plus the staff salaries and budget for rent, electricity, utilities blah blah blah..unless its made in china with slave labour.
 
hilarious, TH is deleting the comments that logically highlight how worthless this card really is while leaving comments that mention "windows' ip stack" which the comments's author obviously knows nothing about.
 
Ping has little to do with packet-loss and other factors... did any of you actually read this interview?
 
The comments here are overwhelmingly negative with ignorance abound. The Killer NIC may or may not be worth the money to you, but it does work as advertised, and does everything it says it does. It improves latency in games. I own one, and the difference is obvious.
 
SO let me get this straight. for 150bucks I can shave .02Ms off my ping time............... I would get better results drinking a redbull.
 
Interesting how so many are so quick in call the KillerNic BS, yet do not own one or have any real clue what they are talking about. I own a KillerNic M1. I spent a solid week benchmarking my online games, monitoring the min, max, & avg frame rates, and lag time. Then did the same with the KillerNic installed. Most of my benchmarking was done in Lord of The Rings Online. My average ping time dropped by 10-20ms, my average frame rate went up by around 15-20fps, max fps went up by as much as 40fps, and min went up by around 10fps. In driving games like Project Torque, driving was noticably smoother, and virtually eliminated other cars jumping & warping around, even in extremely laggy races like thunder ally. It DOES work, and for me was noticable. (oh yeah, and I can download bit-torrents now with zero impact on my gaming). I'm very happy with my KillerNic. =)
 
There are so many comments on this list that show some people are too quick to comment. They fall into 2 categories (I'm being nice I think there are more)

a) they did not read all the article
b) they did not understand the article

Do I own one? Yes a Killer K1. Do I work for them? Nope. Are the cards all about the 0.2ms or 2FPS? Nope.

It's the overall smoothness and removal of lag/glitches/cpu between Windows, and the on-board NIC(s) and their drivers.

Some people are saying how you can buy bits of hardware cheaper. Have you factored in the cost of writing top notch drivers? Do you realise what a high quality driver can do vs. the cheapo ones that come with your $5 NIC and how long such drivers take to write? Look at nVidia with their Workstations cards. The hardware is about identical to the gaming cards, the extra cost is for the drivers not better hardware.

Sure you can save the $150 and spend more on a graphics card upgrade and when your OS slows, glitches and/or freezes mid-game what will your $150 graphics card upgrade gain you? Sometimes balance is better than top-loading certain areas.

To those that say I'm not running anything else when I'm gaming, do you know what is happening simply by running that Vista network stack? how much code does your data go through from that Cat5/6 cable to the game getting it and vice versa.

This package is a 'best-of-breed' software and hardware stack for gaming and as such is tuned for that. The best compliment I can pay to the card is not how much faster everything seems but rather it's always the same speed, at the same low CPU utilisation without variance or interuption ever. If you have that already then you don't need a Killer NIC.
 
While I'm not sure the card itself is that interesting, the key point in here is 'bypassing the single-threaded Windows TCP/IP stack'.

And that, I can definitely believe brings improvements.

Case in point: I play World of Warcraft. I've set up my network to have as direct a path as there can be between my machine and the server. Under Windows, the best ping time I get is 90 ms; more often than not, when the server is heavily loaded and there is all kinds of traffic, said ping climbs up to 200ms.

If, for any reason, I reboot into Linux and start the very same WoW binary (through Wine) on the very same server, ping falls down to 45ms and hardly, if ever, reaches 100ms. Using the same graphic card and very similar rendering technology (OpenGL engine of WoW), I must confess that even without a top-notch system, I get much more fluid gameplay (and higher frame rate) when the Windows TCP/IP stack is taken off the equation (no one can dispute the fact that the Linux TCP/IP stack smokes Windows' - if only because Linux is SMP-optimized)

In fact, I'd gladly play WoW under Linux full time if Blizzard ported their Mac OpenGL's hardware-accelerated mouse cursor code to the Windows' OpenGL client - as unfortunately the software one is jumpy and lacks precision.
 
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