Latest Realtek NIC driver offers 10% CPU reduction on high bandwidth loads

[mrk]

Last updated the Realtek LAN drive back in April but never paid any attention to actual CPU usage when maxing out the bandwidth, only really noticed the higher than expected CPU use after monitoring task manager doing speedtests since going FTTP and doing a bit of research leading to info showing that the Realtek 8125 family of onboard NICs on all mobos use CPU resources. It's nothing that results in noticeable performance drop in anything, but it's still CPU usage nonetheless and a 10% saving here and there is nice to have I guess.

HWINFO64 was reset for each speedtest run, 947Mbps up and 947Mbps down, the max CPU usage at the end was recorded.

April driver:

July driver:

 

[mrk]

Basically all boards I have looked at in recent years come with Realtek's NICs, so this would apply to all these boards inc higher end "gaming" boards and the like. Intel's 2.5GbE NICs have their own issues as well so it seems unless you buy enterprise orientated NICs which cost £££, then you're stuck with buggy Intel cards, or CPU intensive Realtek ones.

I'm tempted to actually buy a USB 3 to Ethernet adapter to see how much CPU utilisation they have vs the onboard Realtek. The USB chipsets do dedicated processing amd adapters like the cableMatters/Ugreen etc cost less than £30 and appear to have dedicated chips for processing.

Actually I think I will order one off Amazon to put this to the test lol.

LAN transfers don't matter to me as I don't do LAN file sharing, but I have FTTP which is basically a gig up and down symmetrical so I'd still see the same CPU utilisation up/downing large files etc.

 

[mrk]

No performance is fine, there's just higher than expected CPU using when large downloads or uploads start it seems

Edit*
There is a setting in device manager called Large send offload (tcpip v4) - That's on by default, turning it off resulted in a 2% reduction in CPU use during the speedtest run. Speeds remained the exact same. Some of the other settings may reduce CPU use further too but have not played around with them much yet.