Killer Network Card allegedly reduces SL lag

Anyone try this network card yet? It is supposed to decrease SL lag:
http://www.killernic.com/games/2ndlife.aspx

Would love to hear from others who have used it before buying it

Looks like it mostly offloads network trafficing from your CPU to the NIC. The benefit you get from this is not going to be huge, especially if you've got a mid/high end PC that doesn't have a CPU struggling to keep up with what you're asking it to do.

It says something about replacing/bypassing the OS network stack, which makes me a little nervous.

For US$150 or US$250, the prices on the two models they have, I probably wouldn't buy one. It's an interesting idea but I think for that money, you'd be better off investing in more memory or disk or a better vid card..

edit: nothing this card does will improve the network connection from where it leaves your PC to where it ends up at LL. It's only speeding up stuff inside your PC.

EDIT: Some of what I said in this post may be wrong. I've posted a retraction below. I'm leaving the original post intact, though, because I don't KNOW it's wrong. I just think it probably is. Readers, take what you want from each post, as you see fit. [/edit]



If nothing else, I gotta say that's the coolest heatsink I've ever seen (no pun intended). I'm sure it would command heavy bragging rights at a LAN party.

But as far as actual performance, Tom's review seems pretty telling. I'm not crazy about how they did their testing (I would have done it differently), but I think the results they got are probably well representative of what a user could expect. While ping dropped substantially, FPS only improved 6%, which on the high end rig they were using, translated to 1 extra FPS. On a less powerful setup, 6% wouldn't even be noticeable.

Of course, on a weaker rig, the difference might well be more than 6%, since the more powerful machine really doesn't need the help the card might be offering. But that's just a guess. Until someone actually tests it, there's no data to go on (which of course is why you posted this thread in the first place ).

Me, I'm inclined to agree with Sindy's take on it. If you've got $150-250 burning a hole in your pocket, there are much more effective ways to spend it than on a shiny cool network card. For the diehard purist, who wants to squeeze every last possible drop of speed from every conceivable corner, and who already has the best possible CPU, hard drives, RAM, motherboard, and graphics cards, then it becomes a matter of "why not?". What's a couple hundred bucks to get that extra frame to someone like that? But for those of us more practically minded, I very much doubt it would be worth it.

That said, I'd be very interested to see some test results, if anyone out there has one of these.


ETA: Newegg and TigerDirect both sell these cards, and both allow returns if you're not satisfied. If you're really curious about it, Imagin, I'd say go ahead and order one. If it doesn't do it for you, send it back.

OK, I'm gonna take back some of what I said in my previous post. After reading some of the reviews on Newegg, I'm thinking Tom's really blew it in their testing, even more than I'd originally thought.

It's well worth noting that the Tom's people were trying to be as hands-off as possible, which the more I think about it, the more I realize was a huge mistake. Gamers know their games, and SL'ers know SL. We're all well aware of what are the trouble spots and behaviors that cause lag within each game and/or VW we play. The Tom's guys were being too shy in their approach (probably because they wanted to be as scientific as possible). They didn't enter into any of those problem areas/behaviors, so they didn't give themselves the opportunity to see what these Killer cards are really for.

The people who gave the Killer M1 good reviews on Newegg, on the other hand, did do those things. Of the results, one reviewer said it best, I think. "KillerNIC... has boosted my FPS in situations where there is LOTS of action going on the screen and my FPS is [normally] dropping like flies. It reduces times where you would normally see lag in the game making for a smoother experience over all."

Put that (and other reviewers' comments) together with Tom's results, and here's what I think you can safely conclude. A Killer NIC might not do a whole lot for you all the time, but in situations where you'd normally lag from excessive network traffic, it likely could save the day. In other words, when you're all by your lonesome, like the Tom's people were, you probably won't see any benefit. But when you're in a crowd, it might just keep your FPS at more normal levels than you'd otherwise get. That could very well make it worthwhile.

At this point, I think I'm sold on the idea (again, just in theory) of this thing. Too bad I don't have a PCI slot to spare right now. If I did, I might give the M1 a whirl.

/me continues to look suspicious, though you're right about this cards bing cred - it's probably the coolest looking NIC I've ever seen.

I'd bet that most of the performance gain is through bypassing Microsoft's enet stack, especially on Vista. I'd also bet that you could get 1/2 that perf gain just by tweaking stuff like MTU and disabling unneeded protocols...

What a coincidence! Someone in RL has just mentioned this network card to me less that half an hour ago - someone who doesn't even belong to SL.

I'm not going to rush out and buy one, though, I wouldn't know what to write on it or who to post it to!!!

A few thoughts.

Some of the replies to the THG test noted that it was only compared to an integrated NIC, and not also to a PCI NIC. I've been using my PC's integrated NIC, so I dropped a Dlink PCI card in, and, yeah, it's faster, too. The benchmarks at Speedtest.net went way up.

I went to Here Island to check the FPS I was getting (I had compared Windows XP and 7 at the same spot the other night) and it does look to be 1 or 2 fps faster with the PCI card.

However, that was around 30fps, so if I didn't have the statistics bar up, I wouldn't have noticed the difference. So, I appear to be getting a similar marginal improvement as upgrading to the Killer NIC, but the Dlink card costs about twenty bucks, not $150.

$150 will buy a hell of a video card. If you don't already have something like an Nvidia 8800GT or better, your money will be much better spent on a new video card.

Ive got one of these cards the killernics

they are great, but mainly in fast paced games where low ping times are a must like first person shooters.

my ping times to server for example went from averaging 60ms down to 20-30ms

which does help in fast paced games aka twitch games like first person shooters, combat mmorpgs etc.

it's not a giant difference by itself, but combined the killernic, with a good connection, upgrade ram etc all of it plays a part is making your gaming experience a premium

really enjoy the card also the card uses linux on the onboard chip which is nice. And games like eve online/ counterstrike / etc where a lot of graphics are also network intensive, it speeds loading up a lot by offloading to the network card freeing up cpu.

but its just a nice boost, not a must have.

I didn't read the review, but did they compare the Killer card against other real add-in network cards, or only against integrated ethernet, which is what the great majority of people have? Almost any add-in card will do the same kind of offloading the Killer does, at a lower price. Also, these cards have been around for a couple years. I remember hearing that their drivers weren't very stable, resulting in crashes. Hopefully they've matured enough to be reliable by now.

There are some who subscribe to the "every little bit counts" theory of game performance, and if you have the money for that, go for it. But 1-2 FPS improvement is NOT worth what those cards cost in my book.

Oh for that matter, add-in soundcards aren't worth it either. Stereo audio takes so little computing power to perform that going from integrated audio to an add-in card won't make a noticeable improvement in game performance at all- and might even make things worse if, for instance, you install the full suite of Creative drivers and applications, which install like 30 background processes onto your PC.

EDIT:

If you want to improve your SL experience, do the following:
- Get a faster hard drive (7200RPM should be considered a MINIMUM)
- Make sure your video is NOT integrated Intel video, but a real graphics chipset that has at least 256MB video RAM (don't buy a notebook with any form of Intel video... at least not yet.)
- If you're running Windows XP, make sure you have at least 2GB RAM, on Vista at least 3GB
- If you're on a wireless network, make sure your signal strength is good and you're not dropping a lot of packets. If you are, get a wireless card or router with a better range. h 802.11n routers are becoming more common, but they're more expensive, and an 802.11g router's going to be PLENTY fast for SL unless you share it with other heavy bandwidth people.
- Upgrade your broadband connection if you're on anything less than 1mbit, cable companies are offering better service than they used to, and fiber optic services (like FIOS) are way fast too.
- TURN OFF ALL P2P PROGRAMS (like BitTorrent) IN YOUR HOUSE. These will kill your SL.
- Look into cleaning up your PC and making sure you're not running a bunch of useless programs in the background. You might be surprised how many applications do this. (For example, the CD burning application Nero installed 2 or 3 background services I had no idea about- which were completely irrelevant to my CD-burning needs)
- Also, if you're on a wireless network, make sure your router's on a quiet channel. Unfortunately this can be difficult to determine if you don't have the right hardware or software, but it can make a big difference. Channels 1, 6, and 11 are usually the busiest and should be avoided, but you might need to experiment to find what works best in your area.

this does a bit more than a normal pci network card.
it has a special driver and offloads all network processing is done on the card itself it has it's own little cpu and memory and a linux bios on board the card. Instead of windows socket on the network layer the card itself does all the pre processing. freeing up os/mem/cpu

of course it's not a gigantic boost, but the biggest boost you see it on is first person shooters or "twitch" games, it REALLY reduces ping times by about half since there is no os overhead. for games like second life ping times arent the main factor when it comes to sl's speed

but in first person shooters, some mmorpgs, and twitch gaming lower ping times = win

the card is heavy and you can actually connect to the card since it has linux on it and actually adjust manually if you want to use more advanced settings

I don't own one or anything, but my general response to these kinds of things is "snake oil", especially when it comes to SL. SL is not particularly CPU-bound, but can seriously task a GPU. Its primary network communication is over UDP, which means that SL handles all its own packet management. I don't really see where a NIC basically just handing chunks of data back and forth over the PCI bus to memory and back (which is pretty much what all NICs do, sans the stack overhead, which is quite small) would give a huge performance boost to something which isn't CPU-bound to start with.

Granted, some integrated NICs have a LOT of CPU overhead, but you can get a decent Intel parallel-tasking NIC for ~$50, and it will make the majority of the difference you will see with this $250 monstrosity.

As someone pointed out earlier, $250 would by a VERY nice GPU which would give a LOT bigger performance boost to SL.

But.. but.. but.. it's got blinky lights and a very cool heat sink!!

Like Chosen said earlier, if you're the type that's gotta squeeze every extra ounce of juice outta your system and you've got the extra cash, go for it. If not, the money might be better spent elsewhere.

Don't You Believe It!

I don't buy it 'cause I don't notice a performance difference with all of my SL data being processed by about 20 GridProxy plugins

3COM started moving the network stack to the network card in the mid '90s.

There's plenty of good NICs that do this kind of thing.

it's more than that though, with my external nic to eve online servers id get 60 average ms pings now i get 20-30s

connecting to the card itself is almost like a router, you get can control the stacks manually if a poweruser

there are also some mods for it to allow mac spoofing, ip spoofing, etc, but ignoring the bad, there is a nice ping decrease from normal network card to killernic.

isp i work for have swapped the intermail cluster over to killernics to help with the loads and it does give much quicker responses.

what good is this card if the modem/router its connected to isnt up to par with it.
unless you provide your own, the one your isp supplies isnt as good as you think.

Hmm, interesting point, about the modem... I'm using a Motorola Surfboard 4200, I think it is, it's years old now. I've heard that newer models, rather than being better, actually tend to have more limits built in, i.e. they may be faster in theory as a result of better hardware but in practice they are slower because the speed is throttled in the firmware. I've never tried another one and not given the matter much thought.

I have thought about my cheapo router. I got the cheapest one I could find, from CompUsa. I wonder if replacing that might help things.

And my network adapter is one of the common uninspiring realtek onboards.

Well certainly before messing with any of those I'd need to get more memory and a better video card.

No point here, just thinking out loud in a post.