EVGA Killer Xeno Pro: The Impact of Network Offloading
by Derek Wilson on July 3, 2009 4:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Networking
Final Words
The approach and design of the Killer Xeno Pro are more efficient than standard network cards. Bypassing the windows networking stack will reduce load on the operating system and the CPU. Bypassing the CPU and OS when sending and receiving audio using supported voice chat software is a cool thing as well. Built in hardware prioritization (QoS) and bandwidth throttling are also interesting features.
But the bottom line is that none of this makes a significant difference in the gaming experience on modern PCs when paired with current games, nor does it offer an advantage over alternatives.
The biggest advantage the Killer Xeno Pro showed was in it's ability to prioritize games over other applications. At the same time, this only works for the one PC that is doing both downloading and gaming. If there are other computers on the network at all, it would be much more cost effective to purchase a router that can handle QoS and bandwidth control on a per application (or per port) basis. Using a router to handle this means that I can download huge massive files on one PC and my wife can play Team Fortress 2 on another without experiencing problems.
I could even play a game on the computer that I'm downloading with in that case, but it remains our recommendation to simply not download in the background while playing a game. More than just networking is affected by downloading in the background, as the harddrive is constantly being hit and this can be a significant source of loading pauses and hitching in and of itself.
If you don't want to spend any money, most torrent and other downloading applications come with built in (or add on) bandwidth controls that can be employed to achieve the same end as hardware QoS. Hardware QoS and bandwidth control are nice features to have, but they are not worth $120.
The voice chat acceleration could be beneficial when gaming while chatting, but currently most applications are not supported. Teamspeak, Ventrillo, and Skype all need out of the box support at the very least. At best we would want all games with built in voice chat to support this as well, but that isn't likely unless and until the hardware becomes more popular. In addition to application support, voice chat doesn't take up a significant amount of CPU time and the most significant impact on latency is still going to be the network as a whole.
TCP/IP offload is a better way to do things, but the benefit to the gamer just isn't there. Network load just isn't high enough to really take advantage of the hardware in modern games. But it isn't like the potential benefit of an NPU can never be realized: it starts to matter in the server space where technology like this was originally targeted. Offloading the CPU of a heavily loaded database server can definitely leave more CPU time for processing tasks and can increase network responsiveness. This just isn't what the Killer Xeno Pro is targeted towards.
So, when you've already got an on-board network card, is the Killer Xeno Pro worth $120-$130 USD? When that money can be put into either CPU or graphics, the answer just has to be no. At the same price as a Radeon HD 4850, there is just no reason not to look toward upgrading older graphics solutions. If you've already got something on the level of the 4850, then that money should be saved for your next graphics hardware upgrade where it will still have a higher impact on performance and experience.
For professional gamers and those obsessed with twitch shooters, for the gamers running 1280x800 on a 30" panel with most of the settings turned down on the highest end hardware money can buy, for those who are always after whatever option might give them the slightest edge: the Killer Xeno Pro might be for you. But even then, this hardware is the icing on the cake rather than a core ingredient.
What the geek inside me really wants to see is more general access to the hardware. This is, after all, a PC on a PCIe card. If Bigfoot gave us deeper access to the hardware, we might find more (even if equally niche) uses for an extra PowerPC processor in our computers. Additionally, to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, we would like to get our hands on a couple more of these cards in order to do some LAN testing using combinations of standard and Killer network cards to see how overall network performance is changed (if at all) especially with respect to voice chat performance.
Beyond this, there is a caveat. Perhaps, as broadband becomes more pervasive, game developers might want to push networking. At some point in time, games may need the PCs they run on to handle a much larger volume of network traffic in order to function well. Right now, game developers are targeting current bandwidths using current commodity network hardware. Games can't be designed to require higher performance networking gear because consumers either don't have access to high speed internet or they don't have a network card that does TCP/IP offload (among other things).
At some point down the line, something like the Killer Xeno Pro might become a significant requirement. But right now, for the vast majority of gamers out there, our advice is to save your money.
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tamalero - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
just wondering guys, why you didnt test on a NORMAL machine and not on a high end machine?to test the offloading, you should have used games that are heavily cpu bound or that limits cpu or similars.
a dual core machine with some heavy source based engines and see if it offloads the cpu....
if you're not gonna squish what the card promises, why even test then?
kmmatney - Friday, July 10, 2009 - link
A more useful article would be whether a sound card improves performance - I'd like to see a good article on that.hoak - Friday, July 10, 2009 - link
I hope this isn't a trend, but this review and others like it on AnandTech are not of the caliber of other of reviews past, or what's offered on other sites like X-Bit Labs where rigorous objective testing standards, science, and hard facts are the arbiter of a review, not this subjective and half-assed swill that panders to the the difficulty of testing and baseless opinion.Five Frowny Faces For AnandTech...
:( :( :( :( :(
LoneWolf15 - Thursday, July 9, 2009 - link
"Adding to this, the Killer Xeno Pro hardware is capable of offloading other network centric tasks like VoIP, firewalls, and networked storage (though these features are not all fully supported with appropriate software at this point in time)."This is the ONE use I would find for this card, rather than gaming. I know people who rely on VOiP, or teleconferencing for distance-learning and therapy who could truly benefit from what this card has to offer. And of course, most of those features aren't fully supported.
Hmm. Think I'll just make sure those people have a fast enough CPU to crunch things (which really isn't all that fast, a Core 2 Duo P8400 on a laptop can handle it no problem) and a low-latency network, since I probably can't guarantee even, consistent support with something like this product. Maybe someone like Cisco can buy the company or Killer NIC can look at the business aspect of this, since I think they'd make more money there, and then be able to use it to support the gaming side of things.
jiulemoigt - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - link
I started reading through the comments to see if anyone posted this but the whole test was invalid. Two computers with the exact same hardware going to a location on internet could have totally different latencies because they took different routes to get to the host server.Though the results reflewct reality some times it is going to be fast some times it is going to be slow, but mostly it is dependant on how congested the net in general and how busy your server is. The network stack is not significant to transfering data unless something is broken.
Last most built in NIC have traces directly to the north or south bridge depending on the chip and don't share bandwidth with anything else.
swaaye - Friday, July 10, 2009 - link
Onboard NICs are either on PCI or PCIe and definitely do share with other such devices.Teloy - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - link
«the Killer Xeno Pro can disable it's "game mode" and enable "application mode»; «(...)the major feature of the Killer Xeno Pro is it's ability to offload TCP/IP work(...)... "It's" is a typo only allowed to first grade children... You should pay more attention to grammar when writting an article on a website as prestigious as Anandtech...jaggerwild - Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - link
I have to question why this article was done, unless EVGA is buying space here.........Rasterman - Monday, July 6, 2009 - link
One question that would put things into perspective is how much CPU is used to do TCP/IP functions? My guess is a tiny fraction of 1%, especially with a monster CPU like in the test. Therefore even if you offload 100% of network computation, you are never going to notice a difference.It seems this card might be more useful for a web or file server. Testing it in a system with as high of a network load as possible would seem to be a much better test if the card is actually doing anything. Granted people are going to buy this for games, but the problem testing with games is they are designed to use as little network as possible.
hooflung - Monday, July 6, 2009 - link
Q: Who else would benefit from using this product?A: Among other things, Killer is a UDP (User Datagram Protocol) accelerator, so other applications that are UDP intensive could also see benefits. In addition, programmers, Linux developers, and other enthusiasts will love FNA because they will be able to write or download Flexible Network Applications that run on Killer's NPU. Flexible Network Applications could be VOIP apps, peer to peer file sharing utilities...the list is endless.
Q: Some of the articles about your card say you offload TCP/IP. Is this true?
A: While our card does perform some TCP/IP acceleration functions, it does not fully offload this network protocol (nor does any other network card in the consumer market today). Most MMO and First Person Shooter online games don't use TCP/IP as the primary protocol, but rather use UDP. Among other things, Killer IS a UDP (User Datagram Protocol) accelerator, which makes it EXTREMELY FOCUSED on gaming, and very different from what any other company is offering today.