hardware

Killer NIC Review by Jeremy Starley, MMORPG.COM Jeremy Starley looks at the value of the Killer NIC for MMORPG gamers Into all gamers lives, a little lag must fall. Into MMORPG gamers lives, lag seems to fall like rain in Seattle. Enter Bigfoot Networks, the Killer NIC card, and their crusade against lag. CEO Harlan Beverly is a former Intel network chip architect, and a hardcore gamer*, who was tired of being defeated due to lag. Unlike most of us, Harlan had the expertise to do something about it." title="Killer NIC Review"> Jeremy Starley looks at the value of the Killer NIC for MMORPG gamers Into all gamer's lives, a little lag must fall. Into MMORPG gamer's lives, lag seems to fall like rain in Seattle. Enter Bigfoot Networks, the Killer NIC card, and their crusade against lag. CEO Harlan Beverly is a former Intel network chip architect, and a hardcore gamer*, who was tired of being defeated due to lag. Unlike most of us, Harlan had the expertise to do something about it. Together with Bob Grim and Mike Cubbage, he formed Bigfoot Networks to fight the good fight and save us all from certain, horrible deaths due to lag. "Wait!" I hear you cry, "Lag is bad, but is it evil enough to require a card that costs almost as much as a high end video card?" Well friends, this is the question we are here to answer: Will this card benefit MMORPG players and, if so, are those benefits worth 280 hard earned American dollars? The Hardware - What the heck is it? The Killer NIC - or Network Interface Card - is a PCI card designed to replace the built-in network port found on most modern motherboards. Unlike built-in network ports or other NIC cards, Killer has its very own Linux operating system running on a 400 Mhz Network Processing Unit (NPU) and 64MB of RAM. This is important, as it is what powers Bigfoot's Lag and Latency Reduction technology (LLR). LLR is a set of features designed to increase your Frames Per Second (FPS) in game, and reduce your ping. FPS and ping are commonly combined when referring to lag. A drop in FPS or a rise in ping causes your game to visibly slow down, or even pause. As anyone who has ever played an MMORPG can attest - this sucks. The Technology - How does this thing work, anyway? Let's start with a simple description of how your built-in network connection works in regards to an MMORPG. Information comes from your server to your NIC. (Built in or separate card.) Your NIC then passes this to the Windows Networking Stack, which then passes it to the game, which shows you that you just got stabbed in the back by that sneaky little Hobbit burglar. Sounds pretty fast, right? Sure, it is, except your NIC and the Networking Stack are both using your processor and slowing down your game. Now, this is how Killer is supposed to speed it up: Information comes from the server to Killer. Killer passes it directly on to the game, which shows you punting that hairy-footed little jerk like a football. Killer has its own NPU to process the information, so it doesn't need to steal processing time from the game, which leaves your CPU free to kick up the performance a bit. There are four components of LLR that concern MMORPG players: - MaxFPS - Offloads network processing on to Killers NPU, instead of your CPU. This helps by eliminating any CPU time that was taken up running the onboard NIC. - UltimatePing - Allows Killer to bypass the Windows networking stack and deliver information directly to your game. Bypassing Windows means less time for the information to reach your game, and it also means Windows isn't sucking up processor time for networking. - GameFirst - Prioritizes inbound and outbound network traffic so that gaming information is the first to be delivered. This means your World of Warcraft stuff comes before that new Britney Spears album you bought from iTunes. (You thought we didn't know about that, didn't you?) - FNA - Killer runs a Linux OS on its 400 Mhz NPU. You didn't think all that power went to networking, did you? FNA stands for Flexible Networking Applications, and it basically means that programs can be written to run on Killer instead of your CPU. That USB connection on the Killer? Yeah, someday soon that will allow you to plug your headset in and run Ventrilo or Teamspeak on Killer, freeing up even more of your CPU time for the game. Bigfoot Networks already has a firewall client available, so you can turn off that wonderful Windows firewall and still be protected from those big bad internets. Appearance - What's it look like, man? The Killer NIC is a standard PCI card with a pretty unusual appearance. The most outstanding physical feature of this card is the big - we're talking huge - K-shaped heatsink. It is styled like some sort of deadly K sword, all edges and points. It really emphasizes the point that Bigfoot Networks considers this its front-line weapon in the fight against lag. Aside from the heatsink, the card itself consists of an ethernet port, a USB 2.0 port, an attractive black PCB, and a few small but bright red LEDs that flash with the ebb and flow of your network connection. Size-wise, the Killer NIC is about the same size as Creative Lab's X-Fi sound cards - much shorter than an average PCI-E video card. The card is thin enough to fit between two other PCI cards or between a PCI card and a single slot PCI-E video card. Speaking of fitting between cards: Modern motherboards are starting to become stingy with PCI slots. If you have a dual-slot PCI-E video card or an SLI video setup and already have a sound card or physics card, you may want to make sure you have room to install another card before ordering one of these. If you have room, but it needs to be installed between cards, don't sweat it - Killer seems to run very cool. Disclaimers - Obvious things I feel the need to point out. First, let me start off by saying that we are not a hardware review site, and I am not going to be picking this thing apart with flow charts, bar graphs, and indecipherable techno-babble. We are an MMORPG site, and I want to know if this thing makes the games we love the most any better. We are Farscape to your Star Trek, so if you want those things, there are plenty of reviews of the Killer NIC that provide them. A quick Google will let you set a course for all the über-geek you can stand. The rest of you, follow me through the wormhole, and watch out for Peace Keepers along the way.** Secondly, I don't expect you all to just accept my "gut feeling" about the card without any sort of proof. Consequently, the little proof that can be offered will follow the performance section in the form of some FRAPS benchmarks. Of course, it can be argued that these also mean nothing, since they could have been completely fabricated, but this leads me to my... Lastly, it always comes up, without fail, following any sort of review of a product on a site which accepts advertising dollars from the manufacturer of said product: "Well, I don't trust whatever you say, because your site takes their money, so you are obviously going to say good things about them." People, let me clear this up before we go any further: At no point in time have Bigfoot Networks, MMORPG.com, or anybody else on this planet asked me to bias this review. Having said that, I will admit that the Martians have been telepathically asking me to say bad things about it. But, then again, they always do that. Testing Procedure - You did what with it? Here's how I did what I did, why I did it, and what I did it on. My test platforms were my very own PC, and my fiancée's PC. Here is the basic info, for those of you who like to know these things. My PC: Athlon 64 X2 4200 CPU BFG Nforce 4 motherboard 2GB Corsair XMS DDR RAM BFG 7800 GT video card BFG PhysX card SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card 320 GB SATA2 Seagate hard drive Running games at 1920x1200 resolution. My Fiancée's PC: Athlon XP 2500 CPU MSI Nforce 2 Motherboard 1.5 GB Kingston Value RAM PowerColor Radeon 9600 video card SoundBlaster Audigy Gamer sound card 120GB IDE Seagate hard drive Running Games at whatever they will chug along on best, usually 1024x768 resolution. All tests were run using driver version 2.1.0.6. If you know anything about computers, you've figured out by now that I upgrade mine quite often, and my fiancée, well, doesn't. The purpose of using both computers as test platforms was to allow me to see how Killer influences performance on a higher end PC as well as on a lower end PC. I also tried to slip one over on my fiancée and see if she could notice the difference without me telling her I had done anything. That did not work out so well, but more on that later. As for testing, I played some of the bigger MMOs, both with and without the Killer installed, and benchmarked some of my time on my PC with FRAPS. I tried to do the same exact thing both times, so that the results would be semi-accurate. I also tested some of the games on the slower PC, and benchmarked WoW on that one as well. I played to see if I could actually notice a difference, if I could quantify it with FPS benchmarks, and if I could see a reduction in ping times. And now, a note on testing: Network lag is really unpredictable. There is almost no way to replicate the exact conditions I experienced on the first run through the second time I did a run through. There could be more or less people on the server, more or less network traffic on the internet in general, and more or less people on my cable internet hub in my town. All of these factors plus many more make ping almost completely random and therefore it is extremely difficult to test reliably for any sort of ping reductions. The only way to do something even close to reliable would be to have two PC that are exactly the same, one with the Killer, and one without. If you then connected to the same server, and ran pretty much side by side while watching the pings, you should be able to tell the difference. I don't have two duplicate PCs. Truth be told, I don't bother looking at pings while I am playing MMORPGs, because unless they are atrocious, you don't notice so much. So I did what any responsible journalist in my position would do: I made the ping section really, really short. On to the testing. Performance - Is this thing on? WoW So, the first game I played was World of Warcraft. You knew that was coming, so I don't want to hear about it. With the built in NIC card on my Nforce 4 motherboard, WoW runs like it always does. I have all the graphics goodies and such cranked up as high as they will go, and WoW chugs along pretty smoothly. Until I hit Ironforge at peak time, or go on a raid when the server is busy, I don't notice too many slow downs except for the occasional lag spike here and there. So of course, I wanted to push this and go on a raid in Molten Core at 8pm EST. My performance varied, to say the least. Wait, did the server crash? No, that was just a giant lag spike that wiped half the raid, it's ok. Ping? Well, the little bar showed green... NO. RED. No, green. Yelllllllow, RED. Oh, you kept moving, you're out. No surprises from the built in NIC, so I popped in Killer and tried again. The game was smooth as always in most areas. Ironforge at peak times still slowed down, but I thought it was maybe a tad smoother. Then I hit MC again. Holy ghost, Scooby Doo. Game play was noticeably smoother. I seemed to experience less lag spikes pausing me momentarily, and it felt faster overall. Sure, we still wiped on a big lag spike, and there were still times when it felt like I was pausing, but they seemed to come fewer and farther between. The last time I noticed a performance increase that felt this big, it was when I went from 1GB of RAM to 2. Ping was still a game of Red-light/Green-light. Non-Killer Performance Min FPS - Max FPS - Average FPS 0 - 62 - 56 0 - 62 - 55 Killer Performance Min FPS - Max FPS - Average FPS 0 - 62 - 55 0 - 62 - 55 As you can see, the numbers don't seem to corroborate my story. During the first benchmark, the average FPS is actually higher without Killer installed. However, the min and max FPS in most MMORPGs tend to be the 0 and as high as the game/card will let it go. What you can't see with the numbers is how Killer smoothed out the performance and resulted in less lag spikes overall. Next, I tried to install Killer on my fiancée's PC without her knowing. I got it in there ok, but when she fired up WoW after school one day, she immediately knew something was up. "Did you put that thing you are writing about in here? Something is different." So, yeah, it didn't take her too long to figure out I had tried to pull one over on her. It also took me a few days to convince her to let me pull it back out so I could continue testing. That's how much of a difference it made to her. I tried it out on her machine myself, and the difference was immediately apparent. Her PC struggles with WoW with all the settings on medium at 1024x768 resolution. It slows down when too many things are on screen, it slows down on the Griffins. Basically, it slows down whenever you are doing anything worth doing on Azeroth. With the Killer NIC installed, it doesn't slow down very much at all. Whereas on my PC it smoothed it out noticeably, on her PC it sped things up very noticeably. Suddenly she is able to survive ganking attempts, dungeon groups, and she can actually run around in Ironforge without freezing every few steps. I wasn't going to do any benchmarks on her PC, but I had to see for myself what the number said about this crazy speed up on her machine. Non-Killer Performance Min FPS - Max FPS - Average FPS 0 - 59 - 36 0 - 67 - 37 Killer Performance Min FPS - Max FPS - Average FPS 0 - 60 - 46 0 - 62 - 48 Wow. Over a 10 FPS increase just by installing the Killer NIC. It is starting to look like it really makes a difference on older systems playing MMORPG games. EQII My next test subject was everyone's favorite lag monster, EverQuest II. I played EQII with the default settings that it recommends for my PC, since doing otherwise usually results in me spending hours tweaking settings and not actually playing the game. I remember how excited I was when this game was released. I remember being excited right up until the point I left the new player island and hit the city of Qeynos, better known as "Lag City". I couldn't believe that even after chopping the city in to different zones, SOE couldn't control the massive lag occurring there. Even now, after many patches and server population hemorrhaging, the cities are still quite laggy. I could definitely see the jerkiness imparted on my frame rates by this, and I even experienced a couple of three second pauses. And, I was unpleasantly surprised to see that the Peat Bog still causes me to experience a slide-show. Of course, outside the city the game seems much smoother, until you hit a populated dungeon area like Black Burrow or Stormhold. There, the FPS dip again and you sometimes die horribly because that gnoll or skeleton sure didn't look like it was right next to you two seconds ago. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Once again, after putting the Killer NIC back in, game play was noticeably smoother. Unfortunately, it still gets jerky in cities, although I did not experience any pauses with Killer. Outside the city, I did not notice any jerkiness or pauses until I once again found myself with a couple dozen other players in dungeons. To be fair, I don't think that there is much you can do to make EQII run well all the time. I have friends who play nothing but EQII, and have the bleeding-est edge of technology installed in their systems. They still experience jerky framerates and pauses from time to time. I think that is more a side effect of trying to future-proof the graphics engine, and it's not really something any piece of technology is going to be able to solve. I'm of the mind that 10 years from now, EQII will still run like a three-legged dog on the PCs available then. I couldn't even tell you if pings were lowered. They skip around so much in this game that I would swear they are just using random numbers. They seemed to stay fairly low, both with and without the Killer NIC installed. Non-Killer Performance Min FPS - Max FPS - Average FPS 0 - 269 - 38 0 - 242 - 37 Killer Performance Min FPS - Max FPS - Average FPS 0 - 305 - 39 0 - 306 - 38 Again, the numbers do not reflect the additional "smooth" injected in to gameplay by the Killer NIC, and only show a 1 FPS average increase. However, this time, they also show that the max FPS reached was higher with the Killer installed, and by a significant margin. What does this all mean? Well, nothing really. It means that the numbers do not reflect well the fact that you can actually feel a difference with the Killer NIC installed, and that the occurrence of lag spikes was less frequent. Once again, I tested this game out on the low end PC as well, and, as I expected, the improvements were much greater. My fiancée's PC has always had a difficult time with EQII, and the Killer NIC made a vast improvement in its performance. In the past, her characters have literally frozen in place for upwards of 20 seconds while running around in Qeynos, and now they seem to fare much better, although they do still occasionally pause for a couple of seconds here and there. Killer NIC's ability to free up more CPU time for the game definitely gives a huge benefit to the lower-end processor in her system. Guild Wars Everyone's favorite monthly fee-free MMORPG is up next. I didn't bother removing the Killer NIC to test without it, since I have been playing GW constantly the past three months, and I know what it runs like with all of the settings cranked up as far as they will go. Let me sum it up for you: Unless I am in one of the major hub cities, such as Lions Arch or Kamadan, I pretty much don't ever feel the effects of lag unless I am PVPing. that's where I took the Killer this trip, to the Battle Isles to see if it would help me live just a bit longer in PVP. Well, it didn't, but that wasn't its fault. I just plain stink at PVP in Guild Wars. Come to think of it, I just plain stink at PVP, period. What it did do, however, was remove most of the annoying tendency of players to "blink" around the screen. I say most of, because some players still "blinked" around due to their own laggy connection to the server. I'd love to say it did more for GW, but honestly, this game has always had very few noticeable lag issues. Ping? Grats. Oh, PING. No, I have no idea if it was lowered. I cannot figure out how to display it, and the ever helpful GW community either doesn't know or wasn't willing to share the secret. Non-Killer Performance Min FPS - Max FPS - Average FPS 0 - 63 - 51 0 - 63 - 47 Killer Performance Min FPS - Max FPS - Average FPS 0 - 63 - 53 0 - 63 - 50 This time the numbers actually show an increase in FPS that I didn't feel. Again, in GW, there were very few times that I ever experienced lag without Killer installed. It's nice to see the numbers show it was actually doing something, but aside from less "blinking" by PVP opponents, I didn't actually feel any difference this time. But wait. Shocking news. On the lower-end PC, Guild Wars experienced a noticeable jump in FPS. Is anyone picking up on this trend yet? Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes/Villains, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lions and Tigers, and Bears, Oh My. For the remainder of my test games, I played exclusively on my PC, with the exception of SWG. All three of these games showed marked improvements in FPS with the Killer NIC installed. I still cannot believe that after all these years, the SWG engine is still capable of bringing a system to its knees if you turn up all the options. Too bad no matter how high the settings, it still shows its age. This is yet another strike against future-proofing. It's a good thing I have a Killer NIC installed, since Mos Eisley likes to grind down your FPS into the single digit range sometimes, and Killer helped to keep it tolerable. Even my old player city, Estee Enwy, bogs down the FPS without some help from Killer NIC. My fiancée's machine was finally able to break the 20 FPS mark with Killer installed. Too bad she has no interest in this game anymore, since it's actually playable on her system now. I was really interested to take on City of Villains, since it allows me the unique opportunity to use the PhysX card in conjunction with the Killer NIC. During Mayhem missions, the PhysX card allows my PC to display all sorts of cool junk being thrown around when I destroy dangerous objects like cars, phone booths, and mailboxes. (Take that, Captain Mailman.)Unfortunately, all this flying debris really starts to bog down the frame rate when two-dozen cops charge around the corner to beat you down for scratching their cars, and the four other villains in your group start throwing sparkling special effects at them. When I tried it with the Killer NIC, I had a lot less slowdown. It was very cool to be able to run around freely without worrying about being thrown in jail because I was too lagged to get away. Dungeons and Dragons Online also benefited from the Killer NIC. DDO has the unique distinction of being the only MMORPG I tested that requires you to dodge blows, manually swing your weapon, and generally do a lot more active things during combat. This is a great concept, but it can be frustrating when you lag. Again, with Killer installed, combat was much smoother and running around with a full party in the sewers felt a lot faster. I also managed to slip in a few (hundred) rounds of Battlefield 2142. I know, this game is not an MMORPG, but most people don't play just one type of game or another. I wasn't sure the Killer NIC was even having an effect on this game until I found myself in the middle of an EM strike with the ground exploding all around me. This usually causes my computer to slow down to slide-show mode, which in turn causes me to get stuck in the explosions and die. I kid you not, the first time this happened with the Killer installed, I died anyway. I was so stunned that I could move normally during the explosions that I just stood there and looked around. My FPS still drop, but not by much. Conclusion - Is it worth my hard-earned bones? I admit, I first heard about the Killer NIC after the PhysX cards were released, and I was extremely skeptical. Sure, I said, we just need a separate card for everything now. First it was physics, then a company announced it was working on an AI card, and now a NIC? Wait a minute, I already have a NIC built in. I was convinced that PhysX was worthwhile for all the physics goodies it could add to games, but that a separate NIC was not something that would do anybody a whole lot of good. Well, here we sit, six months later, and almost nothing uses the PhysX card. Sure there are plenty of games on the horizon, but for now it sits in my case collecting dust and raising my system temperatures. On the other hand, almost every multiplayer game out there now can see at least some small benefit from the Killer NIC. Is it worth it? Well, let me tell you what I think of it, who I think it can benefit most, and then you can make up your own mind, since worth is very much a personal opinion. What I think of it: To me, having a Killer NIC installed in my system is great. I love that even in games like Guild Wars, where it has very little to improve, I can still see some small benefit. I love that in other games I can see a noticeable increase in FPS and that it seems to smooth out and equalize the performance. Now, I'm sure some of you have heard the rumors that installing a Killer NIC will cause you all sorts of headaches and problems. Let me tell you what I experienced. I am lucky enough to have a motherboard that has three PCI slots. This means I can install Killer without removing my sound card or my PhysX card. Well, it means that in theory, anyway. In reality, my motherboard refused outright to see the Killer NIC in any slot but the bottom. That was not so great, since it meant moving all my cards around until I discovered where it would work, but it was a problem with the motherboard, not the card. Fine, now it's in, I can start testing. Wrong. Once I had the card in, I found that it would randomly not power on with the rest of the system. This meant that every time I turned on my PC, there was a 50/50 shot of the Killer actually receiving power and being detected by the software. Once again, the Killer is blameless, and I can curse the manufacturer of my motherboard. A BIOS update seemed to fix this up nicely. The Killer NIC can be run in gaming mode, or normal application mode. Bigfoot claims that if you experience problems with something in gaming mode, switching to application mode should solve them. I pretty much forgot to ever switch to app. mode, since I never had a problem with any software. Firefox 2.0 is locking up, but the same problem occurs on my laptop and my work PC, so I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with the Killer NIC. I think a majority of people tend to blame the most recent change in their system, rather than realize that adding something to the system can expose an existing instability. Add to that the fact that the Killer NIC has, in the past, had a few problems of its own and I can see why people automatically blame it for their problems. However, I want to be clear here, I experienced no actual problems with the Killer NIC itself. In fact, when I installed it on my fiancée's system, I had no trouble at all - from the card or the system. Who I think can benefit most: Drawing a conclusion from testing on my own PC as well as a lower end PC, I would have to say the people who would benefit the most are people with mid-range PC specs. My fiancée's PC is by no means the slowest thing I have heard of running WoW or GW, but it can certainly benefit from less CPU overhead. It could also benefit from a new processor, new RAM, and a new video card, all of which would require a new motherboard. Adding all that up, it would definitely be cheaper to purchase a Killer NIC for a boost in performance. For people with really low end systems, you will undoubtedly benefit more from upgrading your other components than from installing a Killer NIC. You simply don't have the resources to free up to see any benefit. For those of us with higher-end PCs, it comes down how much you are willing to do to increase performance, and if you are willing to do it intelligently. For example, I could very well upgrade my BFG 7800 GT video card to a 7900 model, but it would be cheaper to install a Killer NIC, and the performance boost would be greater. However, I could certainly save that money and upgrade my processor to an AMD FX for an even greater performance boost. For the people who already have the latest and greatest, let's face it: You have probably spent more than the gross national product of some countries upgrading your rig. If you are in to squeezing every last ounce of performance from your system, $280 for 1 or 2 more FPS is probably worth it to you. (At the time I am writing this, the Killer NIC can be picked up for $249 from many online stores. The MSRP is still $279, however.) Final Thoughts: What it boils down to is that the Killer NIC does what it says it does, and you can definitely feel the difference in MMORPG games. It may not appeal to everyone, but I think that those of you who do pick one up will be pleased. As an added bonus, Bigfoot Networks will undoubtedly be releasing more FNA programs in the future, which can only improve its value. And me? You'll have to compete with my fiancée to get it away from me. Now excuse me, I feel the urge to go hurl fireballs at some orcs. * How hardcore is Harlan Beverly? He met his wife online while playing Ultima Online. Their characters married and had two children, Christopher and Samantha. Eventually, Harlan and his wife married in real life, had two children, and named them - you guessed it - Christopher and Samantha. Harlan says the biggest difference between his online family and his real family is that he can't send the children off to mine gold for him. ** For those of you not familiar with these shows, I offer the following explanation: In Star Trek, characters gibber on and on about technology and exactly how they are going to make it do what they need it to do. In Farscape, when a character attempts a techno-babble explanation he is quickly shushed by other characters who don't care how it works, they just care that it works.

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