End-user Benefits?
TH: This feature would seemingly benefit end-users with slightly dated hardware (old single- or dual-core processors). Does this feature pose a benefit to enthusiasts with high-end quad-core and extreme dual core processors? How about for upcoming i7 (Nehalem) processor technology?
Harlan: Our testing with dual- and quad-core machines have shown equal or better gains than the older single-core machines. Most online games cannot, by their nature, take good advantage of multi-core when it comes to networking. Things have to happen in order, and that means serializing it. The Windows Kernel isn’t optimized for multi-core, either. Driver developers who want to take advantage of multi-core can only do so if they have different functions or asynchronous behavior. This isn’t true for networking. Having data for the same socket out of order is a gaming disaster in terms of performance and playability.
In general, our testing shows that since Kernel drivers and the Winsock and Networking Layers of Windows are NOT heavily multi-core optimized, that our impact is greater on many dual/quad core processors because core frequencies are usually slightly lower than single core processors. Even if they were optimized for multi-core, the whole paradigm of “interrupting on every packet” and “spend as little time as possible” and “optimize for latency and not throughput” that we focus on is so different and independent from number of cores that it blows away any other solution even on highly optimized code. More cores are better for your graphics and physics and AI etc., but networking always has to have a sequence, and only one company is dedicated to making that sequence as fast as possible, and optimizing for the best latency response and the best possible FPS for each game we test (and we test almost all MMO and online FPS games).
TH: The Killer NIC’s ability to execute a self-contained firewall and run clients for services such as BitTorrent (FNA) would seem to offer a unique advantage to the cards user by removing the processing of these functions from the main system. However, if the user were to use FNA based BitTorrent without the use of an external hard drive on the Killer NICs USB port, would the disk I/O generated by heavy torrenting make up for the offloading of the UDP processing?
Harlan: Great question, as it is a feature I’m currently actively working on with our Development team. In general, we have some of the best developers in the world on our staff! How did we do that? 1.) We live in Austin and we are a gaming company, so we attract the best & brightest engineers from some of the worlds’ best companies. 2.) While I was an Architect at Intel, I made a LOT of friends, and those guys were asked by Intel to move back to Intel Oregon... BAD MOVE! Almost none of my former team left to Oregon, and instead many took jobs at start-ups in Austin. Bigfoot was the happy beneficiary of many of those folks, including Charlie Musta, a guy who I think is the worlds’ best Windows driver developer with over 25 years of driver development experience and who happened to also co-found Bigfoot with me.
That said, we have several pretty slick ways of limiting the disk I/O problem for things like BitTorrent vs. gaming, and I bet you can probably guess what it is. Ironically, it is doing what Intel and others do but only for non-gaming applications. In short, we have in development the ability to allow some data to be optimized for throughput (like disk I/O and File Transfer) while other data takes the low-latency Bypass path. This isn’t easy stuff to do, so I don’t have an ETA on when it will be widely available, but it is definitely “optimizable” with an NPU, since we can optimize each connection independently.
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Surely the overall game network is only as fast as the slowest component. Your network card may be optomised but if it is waiting for slower player's systems to respond then where is the advantage? Is there any benchmarking to show an advantage for this technology and are millisecond gains noticable in the real world?
the game has to wait for windows to handle the IP normally. faster systems do this faster but its always faster if the whole stack is operated by specialised hardware. i think the reduction in latency is a 2 digit figure. thats noticeable in twitch games
There are people out there still using wires??
Bring me a killer wireless card, then we can talk.
lol at cablefree.
ive seen reviews on this card before, there's one on anandtech, the difference is about 1-2fps and a ping difference of 1-2... IMO the card is a waste of money simply because calculating the UDP and TCP stacks is not a process hungry task until LARGE amounts of data are being transferred, so in conclusion when gaming the only time this card will have an effect is when you are downloading a 600MB map, then don't forget that you router/switch/firewall will also be a bottleneck.
and if anyone wants to argue about the process hungry statement, please use common sense first, u are limited by your internet connection, even on a 20MB internet line your not passing enough data through your onboard NIC card for your Processor to break a sweat.
lol@cablefree too.
do you have any idea the kind of latency that goes on through a wifi stack?
also, given that wires toasts any wifi network no matter what the speed, both on latency and throughput, i'll continue to use wires for my main desktop machine..
do you happen to use a MAC by any chance?
i want to take back a comment i made just b4...
this card is a waste of money for gamming there simply isnt enough large packets going back and forth for it to be useful, HOWEVER in a file server or a desktop that is used to transfer large files over a gigabyte network a card like this would greatly increase performance of the PC since the CPU would not be doing as much.
To Tomshardware,
when you get the card can you do a test on normal gaming and transfer a large file over a LAN using a gigabyte network.
have a 10/100/1000 nic card?
who cares.
still have to wait for the crappy cable modem from comcast to process it or their bad switch in your neighborhood.
plus they use to regulate your traffic until recently to slow down your game or bit torrent traffic....
so much for a killer card.
The backbone company and the cable modem is the slow part...
since when do you see cable modem going to 100 mb/s to internet?
@Flakes
It wouldn't help with file transfers as this is only optimising UDP packets not TCP which file transfers use.
"do you have any idea the kind of latency that goes on through a wifi stack?"
That was my point - surely a good target for 'killer' hardware?
No actual benchmarks just a lot of blah blah blah.
I've owned the top end card since it first came out. I love the firewall (bear in mind I'm a security specialist). I must say though that when it comes to improving the fps of online gaming it REALLY ROCKS!!! I've mainly played EverQuest II and LOTRO and both improved greatly ( I did write down all the figures ) I've up graded my pc in the mean time so my initial system was a dual core clocked to about 3ghz with 2 gigs of ram and and AGP!! Gainward Bliss GS 7800 something lol. Now on a quad core clocked either 2.4 or watercooled to 4ghz
4 gigs of ram and 8800GT alphadog XFX. Both showed marked performance on paper but the Killer excels with the feel of the game. The claim that there's no more jerk-ola in Brie in LOTRO is absolutely spot on. Worth mentioning I have tried this on many ISPs and networks ranging from 2Mb/s to just over 21Mb/s actually measured speeds before the Killer. I find I often recommend this card to anyone who'll listen 
Buy one then see for yourself. I don't know if they off a money back guarantee but they should as they shouldn't need to pay out on it.
@ Alfin ,
So you 'feel' that it's faster but no actual figures to show us and then......
which you then go on to tell us
well i can tell you im running the same setup, q6600 @ 3.2ghz 880gtx and 4gig ram. with NO killer Nic and never had a second of lag or less than 60fps in any online game since i built it.
if there was then to be blunt i would send the parts back as faulty lol
@ Alfin ,
So you 'feel' that it's faster but no actual figures to show us and then......
which you then go on to tell us
well i can tell you im running the same setup, q6600 @ 3.2ghz 880gtx and 4gig ram. with NO killer Nic and never had a second of lag or less than 60fps in any online game since i built it.
if there was then to be blunt i would send the parts back as faulty lol