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SatertekOffline
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Post subject: Killer NIC  PostPosted: Aug 09, 2006 - 01:40 AM
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First there were sound cards and video acceleration cards, next a physics accelerator...now the network card.

This sounds a bit crazy. The Killer NIC has onboard, 64MB of PC2100 RAM, and a 400MHz processor, designed to offload network traffic from the CPU.

It will be interesting to see if this actually works.

http://www.killernic.com/KillerNic/

Oh and the price? $280. Yea I can't see myself buying this anytime soon.

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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 09, 2006 - 02:39 AM
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Honestly. It's all marketing. Most "lag" is due to your ISP being really really slow. Also, it depends on where your traffic is being routed. You can do some pretty good traffic analysis to see where you are slowing down and it's not really your computer. In addition, the overhead of packing/unpacking UDP packets is next to nothing. I don't see paying 280USD for a 0.5-1% increase in performance (And those are generous numbers).

It's all marketing. Don't waste your money....
 
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vandylOffline
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 09, 2006 - 05:04 AM
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I wonder if they're using the ambiguous version of lag -- there's system chunk (your computer barely meets the minimum reqs) and then there's network latency (true "lag")

Ambiguously, lag means anything, real or imagined, that impacts, or appears to impact, your gaming in a negative way.

IE most people who suck at playing online blame their lack of skilz on "lag" - they just need to recognize. nigguh.

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vandylOffline
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 09, 2006 - 05:06 AM
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As an addendum - I can't wait til they start selling "Mad Skills" pci-e cards. Heh - hardwired hax! Take that VAC!!!

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SatertekOffline
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 09, 2006 - 05:45 AM
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Yea they define lag in 3 ways: Client Lag, Network Lag, and Server Lag.

It does look pretty nice, but not 'price of a Wii and a couple games' nice.

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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 09, 2006 - 02:22 PM
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Okay. I would like to clear this whole subject. There are some very well defined terms that are used in these situations.

lag and latency are never used correctly by gamers.

RTT (round-trip time) is the time it takes to traverse the physical distance between you and a server.

latency can only be lightly applied to gaming lag. The true meaning of latency on a network is how long a packet sits in a router before it's retransmited.

lag is a very general term that can mean anything from: "ZOMG I SUCK IT MUST BE LAGGGGG1111!!~~~" to "Oh, my modem exploded, no wonder I had so much lag..."

You can't seperate lag into Client Lag, Network Lag, and Server Lag. Not unless you are a clueless marketing person that is.

The best definition of lag is probably the time it takes for you game to receive signals from a game server. Signals sent to the server aren't much of a concern. Probably 90% of the traffic is from the server to you. The time it takes to convert this packet as it is incoming is next-to-nothing.

There are only three major things that create "lag" in gaming:

1. RTT and Bandwidth. If there is not a good RTT between you and the server then it could take a very long time for the packets to physically reach you. This cannot be solved by a "KILLER CARD ZOMG". Bandwidth also has application, especially for a server. But remember, a 56k modem might have a good RTT but bad bandwidth. They aren't connected. Either problem cannot be solved by a "KILLER NIC"

2. Crappy client hardware. If you have a shitty computer that can barely run a game, it's spending alot of it's system resources rendering, playing sounds, etc. While you may think: "Aha! The KILLER NIC will help alleviate some of that processing," remember, processing packets is only 0.1% of your CPU timetable, if that.

In this situation, the reason your ping is high is probably because the game's network code is in the same process as the rendering. So if you are only getting 15FPS, then your network code is only being processed 15FPS. Even if the networking code is in another process, rendering processes are normally given priority. And what does it matter if you have a high ping and your game is running like shit? Of course, having them in seperate processes on a system with multiple or multi-core proccesors may allow the network code full speed. Well if you have a system with dual-core then you probably aren't running like shit. In addition, the game may still appear laggy, because it's not just graphics that are updating at 15FPS, it's also all the game data. Scene graphs, object positions, states, etc. Your network data can come in as fast as you want but it can only be used to update your game's "world" at 15FPS..

3. Crappy server hardware. This is similar to crappy client hardware, except it can affect everybody on the server, even if they have good hardware.

Anyways, I guarantee, that if anybody ever does benchmarks (non-rigged benchmarks with a variety of hardware combinations) with this card (which the company will probably try and avoid) that there will be a negligable performance enhancement, provided there even is a performance enhancment. Even if there is a negligable enhancement, for 280USD you could probably make your computer perform much faster with other hardware upgrades in that price range.

Now, I noticed that you can run programs on the KILLER NIC card. This most likely could be exploited to cheat in games. Such as a program that sniffs the packets headed for the game and then sends out packets to the server before they even reach the game. All of this done on the card so it can't be detected by the games.

I programmed a similar program that used two computers: One filtered and processed incoming packets, the other actually ran the game on a "Clean" cheat-free computer. If I were a cheater, I would probably have pursued the process further to even have a clone of the game running on the pass-through computer with 3rd party cheats enabled that was undetectable by PunkBuster, etc.

So in closing. The KILLER NIC is a marketting ripoff. I will laugh at anybody who buys one. And in fact, punkbuster and other anti-cheat software might start banning people that use them....
 
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vandylOffline
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 09, 2006 - 03:57 PM
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I think my explanation is better because it takes only a few seconds to read and understand. You don't need the instrumental version.

Goddamn kurt, you need to get laid.

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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 09, 2006 - 07:50 PM
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Actually there is a lot more types of "lag" than that. And I'm only talking about network lag, not video or app response lag. There can be a delay at every single point in the trip: packets into and out of the router/switch/hub, electrical communication attempts from host to host, etc etc etc, they all have delays, though most minimal.

You can also separate "network lag" into Client, Network, and Server if you wanted to, Client has delays packaging and sending, Network has delays transporting the data across the world, and Server has delays processing the data and ack'ing it (technically, Client and Server are the same thing, known as Host delay).

In reality "lag" is simply "a hang (back) or fall (behind) in movement, progress, development, etc." which means "something takes longer than expected." It is a relative measurement, not an absolute measurement.

Some Pretext
Since a host is simply an endpoint in a network and its meaning changes depending on what communication layer you're looking at, let's assume that host from now own means a full computer, parts of which I'll pick out.

RTT is the summary of the delays from HostA to HostB and back and technically only fully matters if the hosts are communicating using a synchronous protocol like TCP or syncUDP, otherwise the trip back doesn't matter.

These might help:
http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

Network Communication (Almost) Explained
Network data coming into a host is mostly processed on the hardware/firmware before it ever gets to the software. It has to go through seven layers of translation until it even gets to the application that has to read the data and translate it into information. The first significant layer of software it will hit is the OS at layer 6, which (in Windows) will generally unwrap the TCP/UDP packet from its protocol and give the information to the process that requested it. The process will then hand the information to the thread (if applicable) that requested it. The thread will then actually read the data sent from the other host and process it. At best, you're looking at 8 layers of translation between sent data and function calls (16 if you count both ends). Technically layers 1-4 occur on almost every router it encounters and 1-3 on every switch and hub.

Network Bottlenecks
Note that only layers 1-4 are handled in hardware, layer 5 is handled generally in firmware (so basically hardware), layer 6 is [debateably] at the OS level, and level 7 at the application level. That is provided there are not multiple layers in layer 6. Putting layers 6 and 7 into firmware (onto the Killer NIC) could speed things up as it is processing of a lot of data in reality actually.

At layer 7 you have various types of lag (or delay if you will) to be considered, namely loss, choke, RTT, and decode/encode.
As said before, at layer 6, RTT amount of time for a packet of data to be sent from the OS/App of HostA, recieved by the OS/App HostB, and sent back to the OS/App of HostA.

Loss is the delay in sending coherent information from HostA to HostB (both Layer 7) due to having to resend pieces of it because they did not arrive in a timely manner at HostB or HostB's acknowledgement did not arrive to HostA in a timely manner.
Choke is the delay in recieving coherent information at HostA from HostB (both Layer 7) due to having to resend pieces of it because HostA's buffer for incoming data filled and pieces of data had to be rejected (lost to the aether). HostB sees this as loss. Choke is related closely to bandwidth.
Encode is delay due to the application at HostA having to wrap information to be sent in a proprietary communication protocol before giving it to the OS to be sent to HostB. Decode is the literal decoding of this information at HostB.

Improving Bottleneck Performance
One trick to speed this up that has been employed is to bypass the OS and make the application Layer 6, this involves supporting individual network cards generally so its use is avoided. This will generally combine layers 6 and 7 into one, saving a little time.

What must be recognized here is that (barring certain QoS protocols) the only thing HostA (your home desktop) can change is Encode/Decode and Choke. You can partially control Loss but not enough to matter, more on that in a second.

Encode/Decode speed generally depends on the speed the particular application can encode/decode its own information to be sent. If coded "perfectly" (in parallel, without waiting on world altering, input requests, or rendering) then you can only speed it up with more processing power (hence kurt's comments on dual processors and parallel processing). More processing power comes from faster/wider CPU, cache, memory, etc.

Choke can be controlled by the bandwidth of the network hardware and the amount of processing power. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can pass through a point in a certain amount of time (usually [kilo]bits per second). This is controlled by your network card, whether it is 10/100 Ethernet, or 56kpbs modem. The other end is processing power, if your NIC can process 1Gb/s and shove that to your application's recieve buffer then it's almost useless if your application can't decode that data and put it to use before its buffer fills up, causing it to throw data away, which causes it to be resent, causing delay (loss at HostB). Bandwidth is also controlled by the rest of your in-home network hardware such as your DSL/Cable modem, router/gateway, and switches/hubs.

Loss can not be controlled really, it can be improved by changing your hubs out with switches and installing better network cabling between your computer and the telephone pole.

RTT is supposed to be calculated without loss but that orthodox definition isn't practical, so we'll consider RTT as said, the average time to go from A to B and back. This obviously can't be controlled and also makes up the largest percentage of the delay in network communication (as kurt said).

As For the Killer NIC...
This card can not help with RTT or Loss or the bandwidth part of Choke, which together generally make up about 95% of the amount of network delay (net lag) in a game. If the card were programmable to take the place of layers 6 and 7 and minimize encode/decode and choke then you're still only getting at absolute best about a 5% increase in network performance. And that is being generous. That would take you from a 200ms ping to a 190ms ping (if everyting else were perfect). It is really not worth the purchase.

A poorly designed engine architecture or a computer lacking in processing power can experience more delay in these areas. This is because the computer is spending so much time doing rendering, altering the world, running ai, loading content, and processing user inputs that it has no time left to encode/decode network messages and the network buffers get filled, causing choke. In that case this card would offer the most performance increase, however, at $250 you'd be better off to buy a more powerful processor or video card.

So yeah, you're all almost right.

(For those picky, I know I was blurring some lines between levels and what processes them, but I don't have time to go into a full explanation.)

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SatertekOffline
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 10, 2006 - 03:45 AM
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      kurtmax_0 wrote:
You can't seperate lag into Client Lag, Network Lag, and Server Lag. Not unless you are a clueless marketing person that is.

      kurtmax_0 wrote:
There are only three major things that create "lag" in gaming:

[seperates into 1. (network lag) 2. (client lag) 3. (server lag) ]


Kurtmax: Clueless marketing person

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jokeyxeroOffline
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 10, 2006 - 11:37 AM
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You caught that too huh?

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vandylOffline
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 11, 2006 - 04:19 AM
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Fuck dude.

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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 11, 2006 - 02:11 PM
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you fools are vindictive as hell.
 
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kurtmax_0Offline
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 11, 2006 - 02:45 PM
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Actually.. i did realise I seperated those into 3 points but my net connection died soon after Sad I'm at work today writing this.

Anyhow, what I meant to say.. is you can't solve network/server lag with a NIC.... and seperating it into those three categories is a rather simple way of looking at it.

I didn't want to get into detailed network stuff like xero....
 
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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 11, 2006 - 06:51 PM
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I barely scratched the surface. But yeah, you really can't solve Internet speed issues with a faster NIC in your computer.

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Post subject:   PostPosted: Aug 12, 2006 - 02:01 AM
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It's not about speeding up the network, its about giving network priority to the game running and offloading a bit of CPU load to the NIC.

Though, personally, I would rather save myself $280 and just turn my BitTorrent off whilst I play.

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