EVGA Killer Xeno Pro: The Impact of Network Offloading
by Derek Wilson on July 3, 2009 4:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Networking
Experience Testing
Because we couldn't perform as many useful repeatable tests as we wanted, we have done quite a bit of just plain gaming. We played with the hardware and without the hardware. We tested EVE Online and Team Fortress 2. Bigfoot reports that Team Fortress 2 sees some of the highest benefit from their technology, and we included EVE in order to gauge impact on network games / MMOs that were not singled out by Bigfoot. We played around with WoW for a while, but we don't have a high enough character to do anything where latency could really matter (large parties playing end-game content). These tests were done the way we normally game: with nothing running in the background and no downloading going on.
In playing on our Core i7 965 system with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 and 6GB of RAM, we spent a couple hours with each game. Half of our time was with onboard networking and the other half with the Killer Xeno Pro. Both games were run at their highest quality settings and resolution on our 30" panel.
In EVE we ran some missions and got into a little PvP action. While we made more isk (EVE's in-game currency) playing with the Killer Xeno Pro, this was just the result of the missions we were handed. Neither PvE nor PvP situations felt any different with the onboard NIC versus the Killer Xeno Pro. Action was just as smooth and the UI was just as responsive no matter what was going on. We felt the same sort of loading hiccups when changing areas with both networking solutions as well: the Killer Xeno Pro just didn't deliver any tangible benefit in EVE Online.
Our Team Fortress 2 testing consisted of lots of different games played on both the on-board NIC and the Killer Xeno Pro.
We do need to preface this by acknowledging the fact that none of us are really twitch shooter experts. Sure, we all played and loved Counter Strike and CS:S, Unreal Tournament in all its incarnations, and many other FPS games, but we aren't the kind of people who run moderate resolutions with 16-bit color and most of the options turned as low as possible in order to get every single possible advantage. We are also not professional gamers; but we do love to game.
That being said, we really didn't notice any difference in our gaming experience with or without the Killer Xeno Pro. I tend to like sniping in games, and typically even non-twitch gamers can tell if they're being screwed out of kills by network issues. I didn't experience this sort of frustration with either solution. Game play was smooth and not jerky or problematic even in larger fire fights when there were no other issues at play. When playing both with and without the Killer Xeno Pro, we experienced some issues when on servers with issues.
It is just a fact that the most important factor is going to be finding a game where you and all the other players have a low latency connection to the server. The slight difference of a minimally reduced client side latency is not going to have a higher impact than any sort of other network issues.
In other words (and to sum up), when you have a bad connection, the Killer Xeno Pro is not going to fix it; when you have a good connection, the Killer Xeno Pro is not going to make the experience any better.
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james jwb - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Integrated NIC's are the de-facto standard in use by Bigfoot's target audience. Almost no one even thinks of looking for an alternative to what comes on there motherboard. We have always assumed the intergrated, free NIC's are more than adequate. This is not the sound card market where in the high-end, people automatically look at add-in boards like the X-fi or Xonar. If Bigfoot wants to sell a number of these cards it's going to have to offer something over the free, integrated NIC's, not add-in cards.This review tells me that for what the average home user does with their PC, it offers pretty much nothing, as most suspected. To me this stinks of an idea that sounded good on paper, in practice failed to deliver any adequate performance increase for the average user, and has only been funded because sometimes bad ideas marketed well can still create profits. Unless Bigfoot can offer something tangible here, I'd honestly like to see them go the way of the dinosaurs (Yes, a big meteor lands on their HQ).
But hey, maybe in the future they can always try the Fatal1ty brand and really go to town :)
Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, but i want something more for my money than marketing and geeky technical spec's for handling something no better (in performance terms) than the boring software TCP/IP stack
Qi - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
But if no comparison between the Killer NIC and other add-in NICs is made, we don't know which add-in NIC is the best. Also, other add-in NICs are substantially cheaper. Take these for example:Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter
Intel PRO/1000 PT Desktop Adapter
Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter
You can get these cards for around $30.
Anonymous Freak - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
That's because those cards have the same chip as the onboard Gigabit Ethernet on many Intel-based boards. (Or at least, the same family of chip, with the same features. Deep down, it's probably the same silicon; just named different for the different interfaces.)lyeoh - Sunday, July 5, 2009 - link
Just claiming the cards have the same chip doesn't mean a thing.Lets see better benchmarks against integrated NICs and other add-on NICs. CPU usage, packets per second, throughput, max latency under various conditions.
This review as it is isn't very useful.
In my opinion if you want a better gaming experience you might as well use the extra money to get a fancy router and use it to squish torrent speeds down (and maybe even force torrents to use smaller packets, if you really want lower latency at the cost of throughput).
A smarter router is even more useful if you are sharing the connection with other computers, since it can also help control traffic to those other computers. Whereas this expensive NIC won't help.
mindless1 - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
Do you know this factually or are you just guessing? Most boards do not use the same chip, and "family" means little, just a generational grouping. By saying they have the same features you are only saying they all have network features and of course they would.Deep down, saying it's the same silicon would be like saying all silicon is the same, all NICs were identical which they are not.
yyrkoon - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
Yeah well, "Those cards" are also the best Ethernet cards out there. They offer ToE, Link Agregrigation, and all the other goodies a network guru would want. I own an Intel Pro 1000 PT, and I can say with confidence that there is no way I am going to spend 6x as much money on a NiC, that will only perform *maybe* as good as the $20 NiC I got on sale.Souka - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
Here's a question...I have a c2d mid-level system..using on-board Marvell Yukon 88E8xxx gigabit adapter.
I have an old Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI (not PCI-e) adapter sitting in a box.... would it benifit me to toss it in?
Same question goes for my sound... Should I use, onboard ADI AD1988B 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC or my old Creative PCI Fata1ity Pro card?
Always apprecaite constructive advice..ideas... :)
Thanks!
yyrkoon - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
Maybe, but probably not. The Marvell Ethernet is possibly tied into the PCI-E bus of the motherboard, which means that it *may* not be sharing the bus bandwidth with other peripherals, CPU, and memory; or it could be. The PCI bus is flawed in that way; e.g. it shares bandwidth with all slots, PLUS memory, and CPU. The PCI-E bus in theory is not, but it does not always work that way.The best way to find it is try them both. The Yukon without the PCI card in, and the PCI card with the integrated Ethernet disabled in the BIOS. Myself, I test with the application I have in mind , but you'll probably have many naysayers say something along the lines of "No! you must use this test app" or whatever. Test apps are great if that is all you're going to do ( test ), but if all you want is XX amount of MB/s coming from your XFS + Samba box, well that is all that matters right ?
One thing that I have found out over the course of *many* tests is that file block size can play a big factor in a lot of cases when testing for file transfers with many protocols. A lot of those times, if you pay attention you will see a pattern emerge. The problem here is that disk block sizes are often much larger than your Ethernet card can handle without breaking down into smaller chunks. Anyhow, to keep this reasonably short, unless you're directly transferring from a large RAM disk, you're going to see a performance hit no matter what between disks and Ethernet. That is where ToE is supposed to come into play, but it does not always work as some would have you believe. The idea is that ToE offloads that processing from the CPU keeping your CPU from bogging down. Still there is lots of possible processing going on, so you're likely to still see a performance hit, albeit probably less.
Hope I did not bore you too much . . .
Souka - Sunday, July 5, 2009 - link
not at all...thanks. What you said makes sense.I might play with it when I have some time.
Sound card will be easy to test via game benchmarks/timedemos...but network card I'll probably just use file copy tests if different type/sizes to see how the NIC (onboard vs PCI) makes a difference.
thx again
yyrkoon - Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - link
I would like to add that any add in sound card should perform better than integrated sound. I did a bunch of testing with Oblivion, and even my old 16 bit Sound blaster !live card made about 5 FPS difference. Now, keep in mind that if you have AGP graphics, that this would share the bandwidth from the PCI bus as well . . . So, if all you have is a single sound card using the PCI bus, you *should* be golden. Also, know that PATA HDD's can use the PCI bus for data as well. But typically, if all your peripherals use less than 133MB/s theoretical you should be ok. Theoretical meaning even PCI communications have overhead too, just like Ethernet and the SATA protocols.