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KillerNic - Network add-in card


Supreme Cmdr
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I want to know how they figured out how to make time actually backwards. Last I checked, latency was a measurement of time, which means it can't be negative.......

Tbh, it just looks like a fancified Gigabit Ethernet Adapter.

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Gaming will never decline. The PC platform will be viable for many years, if not decades or centuries to come, as the hardware engineers continue to push the computing envelope.

We might see the development of organic based memory, or even organic neural nets in our lifetime. We have already seen atoms manipulated to spell the letters IBM.

For the present, the military might be interested in hardware that simulates real time physics but I don't see it making it's way into the mainstream PC market anytime soon.

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...anyways, here is some additional fuel for the fire. IGN does a "benchmark" which, unsurprisingly, supporting(more than) Killer NIC's claim to fame.

Of note, they apparently usedmachines barely capable of running FEAR(their test app) with bog standard crappy Dell machines, which AFAIK don't offload ANY of their networking functions to the onboard NIC. It'd be nice to see them against an nForce board with all offloading enabled, not to mention the review on a site like Tom's Hardware or Anand who at least give out more complete details of the test setup, and conditions...

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The machine they used is quite capable of running FEAR.

It doesn't really matter what type of machine they used since the test is to see how the NIC performs.

And since FEAR is a sys hog, them using that sort of machine config in fact proves that the NIC works as advertized since FEAR is purely CPU (not GPU) bound.

Finally, since the NIC totally bypasses the Windows networking stack, there is no reason why it should not be faster. Thats just pure common sense.

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a. since they did NOT mention video, we'll have to assume that it's likely the standard X300, which is NOT truly capable of running F.E.A.R.

here is a quote from the article:

quote:

We suspect, however, that the fact that these computers were marginal at running F.E.A.R.

The ~15FPS quoted in the article further supports this argument. The Dell Optiplex GX280, in standard configurations, really isn't capable of running F.E.A.R., a FPS, decently in the first place.

b. Every single bench that I have read that uses FEAR clearly shows with the same CPU that GPU choice makes a SIGNIFICANT difference in framerates, indicating that it is not entirely CPU limited. With a CPU limited game, FPS would not vary all that much, say <10% amongst various video cards although in that case there COULD be GPU limitations that also affect the FPS results, e.g. memory bandwidth of the particular video card family, etc.

The real question here is that NIC worth $280 to improve performance of a machine with presumably low configuration or would it be better to spend that $280 on other upgrades? IMO the clear answer is that other upgrades at this point, based upon this single "review", are far more likely to produce improved game playability overall, and not just for network based games.

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