Killer Nic vs onboard?
- Thread starter coughs
- Start date
Nope.
I don't see how it could. It could only reduce the latency between your PC and the router - once the data's out on the internet, it can't do anything. Even with my crappy wireless card, I can ping my router in less than 1ms. So any ping improvement is gonna be a fraction of an ms - i.e. not much.
Basically it will offer and improvement over an onboard chip as normally the mobo ones are some gash Realtek controllers.
The other thing they like to boast about is because it has a fairly sizable onboard processor it can take away the network stack from the OS freeing up CPU cycles. How much CPU does the network stack take when the OS is putting it on the CPU? The answer is not much, but in theory you may see some more FPS in a game.
For latency when playing online it wont really make any difference really as soon as your traffic hits the WAN is where the time delays are encountered. The time travelling from from your router to your PC is almost negligible over all.
So in summary, you're more likely to see a performance increase because the NIC will take over part of the network processing and can run a firewall on its self, again taking away tasks from the cpu. Personally I dont think its worth it as I've never thought to myself that my firewall is taking up too much resource, and as for the network stack....
The other thing they like to boast about is because it has a fairly sizable onboard processor it can take away the network stack from the OS freeing up CPU cycles. How much CPU does the network stack take when the OS is putting it on the CPU? The answer is not much, but in theory you may see some more FPS in a game.
For latency when playing online it wont really make any difference really as soon as your traffic hits the WAN is where the time delays are encountered. The time travelling from from your router to your PC is almost negligible over all.
So in summary, you're more likely to see a performance increase because the NIC will take over part of the network processing and can run a firewall on its self, again taking away tasks from the cpu. Personally I dont think its worth it as I've never thought to myself that my firewall is taking up too much resource, and as for the network stack....
While that's all true it's primary function is to bypass windows tp stack. Widows being promised for data transmission rather than latency means it queues things up as they go in and out. Sadly this can be done with quite simple windows tweaking for zero cost.
Only people who I know see any genuine benefit are ones living at the ends of really long, crappy lines like the channel islands but again, the above tweak will reap similar benefits.
Only people who I know see any genuine benefit are ones living at the ends of really long, crappy lines like the channel islands but again, the above tweak will reap similar benefits.
Indeed, the cpu hit from gaming traffic will be negligible anyway because even burst traffic hardly ever goes over 25k/sec (averaging much lower under 10k/sec). The one exception might be if you are hosting a server and sending traffic to multiple places, but to be honest running a listen server on a home connection isn't going to give a good experience anyway.
The fact is these days pretty much any NIC, onboard or otherwise will ping your router at 1ms or under anyway. Little gain to be had, it's not the difference in say ADSL modem/router which can make a much larger difference to latency when playing online. And of course the ISP itself will have an even greater impact. Amazes me to see people buying one of these overpriced NICs and then connecting to some dodgy ISP with 15ms+ latency
From my crappy onboard card:
Ping statistics for 192.168.0.1:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms
The fact is these days pretty much any NIC, onboard or otherwise will ping your router at 1ms or under anyway. Little gain to be had, it's not the difference in say ADSL modem/router which can make a much larger difference to latency when playing online. And of course the ISP itself will have an even greater impact. Amazes me to see people buying one of these overpriced NICs and then connecting to some dodgy ISP with 15ms+ latency
From my crappy onboard card:
Ping statistics for 192.168.0.1:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms
+1
Major Wtf at all of that?
Allow me to translate
It still makes no sense. UDP (which is what games use) is not optimised for "throughput". No OS optimises it in such a way.
The whole idea of wanting to "bypass" the Windows TCP stack is slightly bizarre. Firstly, it has nothing to do with gaming. Secondly, it's performance is already second to none.
Oh I don't agree with what he said. I think he misunderstood and misquoted a review or their site, where Killer actually claim their card can bypass the Win networking stack to give itself higher priority and communicate directly with the games.
Like others have already mentioned, I think that even if the above is true it doesn't amount to squat on a modern gamer's PC, where latency to the gateway router is dwarfed by that of t'internet. Azuse's comment that the NIC is most beneficial on crappy internet is just plain nuts to me, as this will be when the LAN performance is the least significant delay. It's been some years since CPU was the bottleneck to games, so the effect of offloading net processing to a card will also be negligible. Even Killer themselves say the biggest benefits are to older PCs.
I guess if one already has 6 overclocked CPU cores with 16GB fast RAM, a complement of SSDs and a set of GTX480s then a Killer is next on the list and comparatively good value. For everyone else in the real world, don't bother with it.
Like others have already mentioned, I think that even if the above is true it doesn't amount to squat on a modern gamer's PC, where latency to the gateway router is dwarfed by that of t'internet. Azuse's comment that the NIC is most beneficial on crappy internet is just plain nuts to me, as this will be when the LAN performance is the least significant delay. It's been some years since CPU was the bottleneck to games, so the effect of offloading net processing to a card will also be negligible. Even Killer themselves say the biggest benefits are to older PCs.
I guess if one already has 6 overclocked CPU cores with 16GB fast RAM, a complement of SSDs and a set of GTX480s then a Killer is next on the list and comparatively good value. For everyone else in the real world, don't bother with it.