Killer NIC – First look

Posted at: 2:53am 5th September 2007 by Kevin Pocock

Would you have to be noob with rich parents to pay £180 for a network card, or is the Killer NIC the ultimate upgrade for online gamers?

Bigfoot Network’s Killer NIC is a bit like one-time boxing loudmouth Prince Naseem Hamed; it’s haunted by hype. The hype surrounding the Killer NIC isn’t quite as brutal as Hamed’s reputation in his hey-day; despite the name, all the Killer purports to do is preserve your frame rate while you’re gaming online. There’s a whole Linux computer on this PCI card, with the aim of usurping the Windows TCP/IP stack with a more efficient Penguin-based one, giving you a lower ping, and a more responsive and reliable PC for online gaming.

First impressions of this card are worthy of admiring raised eyebrows. It looks the business, flaunting a trés chic ‘K-blade’ nickel-plated aluminium heatsink. With the card installed, you have a Linux sub-system that you access from Windows. This lets you do cool things through the dedicated Linux system without bothering your main system, but let’s cover the theory behind the bold claim that ‘Killer provides the edge in online gaming’ first.

According to Bigfoot, the Windows networking stack isn’t particularly efficient when dealing with the profusion of small packets common when gaming online. To circumvent this, you need a clever network interface card that can deal with all the necessities, including IP reassembly, and UDP/IP and TCP/IP checksums. To achieve this, you pretty much need a dedicated computer, so under the heatsink, you’ll find a 400MHz Freescale Semiconductor MPC8343EVRAGD Network Processing Unit (NPU). This also deals directly with main game loops, without ever troubling - and being held back by - the layers of the Windows networking stack. There’s even 64MB of PC2100 RAM on the card, so that it can run the Linux OS from its 8MB ROM.

There are a few brand-name technologies to help this NPU, including ‘LLR’ (lag and latency reduction), which performs the legwork. It utilises ‘Game First’, which prioritises inbound and outbound UDP packets based on their type. There’s also ‘Max FPS’, which alleviates CPU, cache and main system bottlenecks, and ‘Ultimate Ping’, which prioritises every packet and improves response time to main game loops. The Killer also accelerates TCP/IP requests, but it’s specifically the low latency of network gaming offload that’s the focus of these technologies. Note, however, that the Killer is just a network card so it can only deal with local problems - if you have a rubbish ISP, the Killer can’t help.

During in-game testing, we switched between the Killer NIC and the on-board Realtek Gigabit Ethernet of a MSI K9A Platinum motherboard. Both are rated at Gigabit speeds, so we were eager to find out if the Killer justifies being £180 more expensive than an on-board NIC.

First up was Counter Strike: Source, a game that should benefit from prioritised UDP packets. The hype claimed that the Killer could make as much as a 20fps difference, but this was wide of the mark. The Killer did make a difference, especially in action-dense maps such as ‘Office’. In such frenzied firefights, FRAPS showed that our PC with the Killer fitted managed timings of mid-50fps, peaking at 62fps. Meanwhile, the on-board NIC dropped into the low 40s in the same action-intensive areas, peaking in the mid-50s, giving the Killer around a 10fps advantage.