EVGA Killer Xeno Pro: The Impact of Network Offloading

Mostly Deterministic Testing

Designing tests to determine the real world benefit of the Killer Xeno Pro has proven quite difficult. Even though frame rate testing with single player games isn't strictly deterministic, proper tests can produce results that are fairly consistent and have low variance. We haven't included many MMOs or multiplayer games that don't utilize timedemo functionality in our graphics hardware tests specifically because they are very hard to appropriately benchmark. We can get ideas about performance from play testing, but graphs and charts have a certain finality and authority to them that we just don't want to lend to tests that we can't stand behind are representative of relative performance.

We did come up with one test that is highly reliable, however. This test is a side by side comparison of framerate when playing EVE online. We ran two different computers side by side with exactly the same hardware and software setup except that we installed the Killer Xeno Pro in one box. Both instances of EVE undocked characters in Jita (a system that typically hosts about 1000 players at a time) and flew to nearly the same spot. Because EVE allows players to choose something to "look at" and centers the camera on that object, were were able to have two instances of the game running with players very near each other (requiring very similar network data) and with exactly the same graphical load (because they were looking at the same thing).

Our EVE test is in a place where there were a very high number of other players and we were able to eliminate as many other factors as possible from testing. This test showed no difference in performance with or without the Killer Xeno Pro:

We attempted testing in other multiplayer environments like Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft, but we couldn't eliminate graphics as a factor when side by side testing with different players like we could in EVE. If we did sequential testing, one run to the next had very high variability even on the same hardware (due to the influence of other players).

We did run some tests in not very highly populated areas of WoW and found that framerate and ping seemed to show no difference. This might be different for highly populated areas, but again we couldn't be very deterministic in testing this.

In trying to do the similar testing with Team Fortress 2, the Killer Xeno Pro would be faster in once instance and slower in the next. There was no real consistency to our data in this case.

Bigfoot claims that there is benefit from the hardware in games like WoW, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike: Source, and other games with high volumes of network traffic. We really do not doubt the capability of the hardware to provide some sort of difference, but our tests just are not deterministic enough to appropriately compare the hardware. But in a way this does tell us something very important: factors other than client side networking (like the performance of the network itself, other players, servers, and potentially graphics) have a much higher impact on performance.

The Killer Xeno Pro does suggest another advantage: bandwidth prioritization and throttling. The hardware is capable of Quality of Service (QoS) like prioritization on a per application basis, and every application can have upload and download bandwidth caps. This could potentially help out when multiple network heavy applications are vying for bandwidth. We decided to test this with both EVE (for framerate and download speed) and WoW (for framerate and latency).

In our EVE test, we used uTorrent to download a 650 MB file while we played EVE. Because we had to do this test sequentially rather than side by side (the bandwidth demand from on torrenting computer would negatively impact the bandwidth available to both PCs -- a point we'll come back to later), our frame rates aren't directly comparable because of all the other player activity. Please keep in mind that fluctuations in the multiplayer environment make this a non-deterministic test despite the fact that framerates are similar.

We did, however, see a very large difference in the time it took to download our torrent.

Since we can't get an assessment of ping times in EVE, we did some testing on WoW in the same unpopulated area. Normalized to the average latency we experienced while not downloading a torrent, here's the latency incurred by downloading a torrent:

Even with these latency differences, our framerates were very constant at about 54 FPS with 0.4% difference between the three different setups.

Again, this might have a larger impact in a more highly populated area in WoW. But the hardware does show a ping time advantage over our on-board NIC when downloading a torrent while gaming.