Enhanced, and sometimes overpriced, nic cards are nothing new. One that’s actually reasonably priced and delivers on improving latency, while the idea shouldn’t seem novel, is.

Bigfoot Networks delivers solid performance from its Killer 2100 PCIe card. In network hardware terms, Bigfoot’s Killer 2100 card is essentially an OE (off-load engine) card. That means, the board has an on-board processor (400mhz) running Bigfoot’s own custom software.

You’ll find OE’s in a lot of gigabit ethernet and they’re all designed to take processing away from the CPU. The whole thing can get really complicated and rather than do a whole detailed write up on the process, here it is intentionally boiled down (don’t flame us, please?):

For network communication (TCP/IP or other data packets), all of the data has to go through to the CPU. Meaning, your CPU takes cycle time away from processing OS functions and other important game related functions, to process internet traffic. When you’re playing a multiplayer game on-line, you need every bit of CPU cycle time you can get.

The folks at Bigfoot go onto explain that many users focus on bandwidth and faster data connections to improve gaming performance. The issue with games are usually not bandwidth related, but rather due to latency issues. It’s not the width of your pipeline, it’s how fast data goes through it, and that’s latency.

Bigfoot’s secret sauce mix of hardware and software enables their Killer 2100 to process game related network traffic and off-load that from the CPU. The overall performance kick you get reduces your latency and allows a souped up rig to run 120+ frames per second on a intense Resident Evil demo.

List price is around $129 available from major on-line retailers and Bigfoot includes a host of software features that allows you to tweak network traffic and give your gaming the top priority.

For more details on Bigfoot Networks and what they do, check out their site.

Frag away!

Share on Facebook