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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
121 Comments
View All Comments
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.