I am a bit skeptical about this but there is this new network card supposed to be designed especially for improving gaming performance.

We know that network performance on the internet and lag depends on many different factors including, ISP performance, routing across the different points between your home and the gaming server you are connected to and performance of your home system (CPU, memory and vid), etc.

It's an interesting idea but I don't think I'm convinced enough to shell out nearly $300 for a network card. I would need some pretty serious evidence for that. lol..

It also looks like this is the first product this company has made.

Here's the info/details:


http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/Store/Di ... ?which=112

Bigfoot Networks is excited to announce a revolutionary new technology called LLRâ„¢, which stands for Lag and Latency Reduction. This is a technology dreamed up and invented by Harlan Beverly, the Mad Scientist of Bigfoot Networks.

So what does LLR do? Simply put, it reduces to nearly nil the effect that problems with the internet cause in your games. This is a lofty claim, and if you are a skeptic like us then you are already saying to yourself “how can this be?” Just like everything else, LLR has some caveats that every skeptical gamer needs to know. First, the caveats:

1.
LLR cannot increase your bandwidth. Total bandwidth is a function of how good your ISP is. If you are on a dial-up connection, for example, you probably have bigger problems to worry about than what LLR can help you with.

2.
LLR works for all games, but because Lag is caused by the Client, the Network and the Game Server: LLR reduces Lag to varying degrees for each game.

Alright, the obvious caveats aside, what can LLR do for me?

1.
You will experience a lot less Lag, because LLR reduces the effects of nearly everything bad that could happen on the internet, from packet loss, to long hop delays, to Lag attacks and ping floods.

2.
It will give you an advantage in online games, because your Lag and Ping (also known as Latency) will be lower when you are using a product with LLR.
3.
Since LLR Technology is built on a customized Gaming Network Processor, it reduces the load on your CPU. This means you have the potential for more Frames-Per-Second in your favorite online video games.
4.
It gives you complete control over your own Ping. You can raise or lower your ping whenever you want. So, you can stop the Whiners who complain your ping is too low, then dial it back down when you go in for the kill.

How does LLR do all this? It’s a dedicated chipset containing a Gaming Network Processor with specially designed circuitry to not only get data to your game faster, but also get it there more reliably, and with less CPU overhead. And frankly, that’s pretty cool.
************************************************

My conclusion is that this is either an attempt to defraud investors, or gullible consumers.

It is very easy to prove that a perfectly ordinary 100mbit NIC (which you can get brand new on newegg for something under $5) is not a performance bottleneck in any current game. If you play on a LAN, that shows you the total possible amount of lag caused by your NIC. Now subtract your LAN ping from your ordinary online ping. That is the total possible improvement you could get from an improved NIC, assuming it reduced all NIC related latency to zero!

Every experienced coder (bani, zinx, rain, and one of the lead developers of http://www.hitechcreations.com/) I've seen talk about killernic has dismissed it as pure bullshit. The so called whitepaper on the bigfoot site is full of bullshit and newbie misconceptions. It is either written by someone who is a liar, completely clueless, or both.

There are some NICs that offload TCP processing to the NIC, but this is of no use to games, since 1) they mostly only use UDP, and 2) this is only a benefit a huge volumes of traffic. Games cannot have this volume of traffic on the client, sincy they must work on a consumer broadband connection, which is typically between 1/10th and 1/100th of what the NIC can handle.

Most games don't even come close to fully utilizing an average cable or DSL connection, never mind a 100mbit nic.

The overhead of processing network traffic for most current games is tiny. The 486 class chip in your average home router has no trouble at all handling it.

There are some devices which include dedicated encryption processors, which is an obvious benefit if your traffic is encrypted, but no games do this and there is no pressing need to do so.

There might potentially be some argument for using a better NIC on game servers, but any high quality server grade NIC should be fine.

Sorry for the rant, but I find this kind of outright fraud quite offensive.

Well I was certainly skeptical. The 1U servers I use for game hosting have 100Mbit and also a 2nd Gigabit Ethernet Card. I've never had a need for anything more than the 100Mbit card that comes in my servers.

Some of the claims of the device were a bit hard for me to believe since I know so many things can produce lag when playing a game.

That shirt that they give you for pre-ording should say Sucker instead of Killer, or perhaps simply:

PWN3D!!

Here's a test and review of this network card at Got Frag
http://hardware.gotfrag.com/portal/story/34683/?spage=1

From the reviewers tests the card gave a slight improvement on the test machines but certainly not enough to pay $300 for over a normal network card.