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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MrHorizontal - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Could you pit the Bigfoot NIC's against some other NICs.I'd like to know what the difference between using a 'Server Adapter' such as the Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual port would be (on a LACP compatible switch, even a cheapo one like the Netgear GS108T) for example, or even a direct comparison with the single port Intel PT card, since they all do a lot of TCP offloading work, though not the entire stack like the Bigfoot seemingly does...
I do give a LOT of attention to my network connection being a very keen MMORPGer, so I'd genuinely like to know what I can do end-to-end beyond just having a good ISP to make my network as good as it can be with a fairly reasonable eye on cost (ie not forking out for f5 and Cisco kit!)
DerekWilson - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
The Killer isn't targeted as competition to server NICs, some of which do a lot more like 10GbE and have specific optimization for handling massive numbers of VMs all trying to use the network at once ... Even server NICs like the Intel ones you point out -- even if they did do full network stack offloading -- are very likely not going to be of any more benefit to gamers than the Killer Xeno Pro.But there is no replacement for testing.
It is something we will keep in mind, but with the limited usefulness the Killer Xeno Pro shows it's sort of hard to justify putting a lot more time and energy into this sort of investigation. I'd like to satisfy my own curiosity on the subject, so maybe it will be something we get up ... but no promises. :-)
MrHorizontal - Monday, July 6, 2009 - link
The Killer may not be targetted to server NICs, but as I and a lot of the other comments have noted the price point of the Killer is equal to that of a server adapter. As for whether or not the stack offloading in the Killer NIC and the TCP/IP Offload Engine in the Server Adapters are different and perform differently, only benchmarking both cards would actually provide a good and honest result.I'd like to see ping tests and iperf results using both cards, with and without jumbo frames, using Link aggregation where possible (LACP is effectively SLI for a network card after all) and a comparison with the best and worst mobo adapters versus the Intel / Netgear 'desktop' NICs and the Intel server NIC's versus the Killer NIC.
Essentially what I'm asking from Anandtech is to find what kit we need to get and what configuration changes we need to make to the registry, routers and switches to get absolutely rocking performance from our LANs... which are after all one thing we can control and where a significant amount of lag originates over and above the latency in the ISP's network.
That would be a useful article of the quality that I'd expect from Anandtech. Harping on about a product that noone including yourselves really believes has a market isn't a good report...
UnclePauly - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
WOW! COUNT ME IN FOR TWO!Myg - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
This article started with the best of intentions, but fell flat on its face when it came to real value (just like the card apparently).You can't expect a network card to increase FPS (we all know thats just a marketing ploy) and you lot know better and should be able to see through that.
This is a networking device, so it should be treated like one. A suite of dedicated server programs should of been used for the testing. It is terribly lazy of anandtech and seemingly a growing trend to not bother with going that extra mile (which made you guys popular in the first place).
mesiah - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
They are testing it for what its marketed towards. The manufacturer makes clear claims in their marketing and this review tested those claims. While it may have some value as a server card, that is not what it was designed for and marketed for. Corvettes have a shitload of power, but whens the last time motor trend talked up their towing capacity? Its beyond the scope of the article.HotdogIT - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Why would they test it as a "networking device", when it's clearly being markteted to gamers? The manufacturer themselves claim ping improvements and FPS improvements in GAMES, so not testing GAMES is silly.Every site who has tested this product, HardOCP, Anandtech, TomsHardware, have come to the same conclusion: It's a 125$ NIC, that's better spent on other components. It either has no impact in gaming, or so minimal that it's within the realm of just dumb luck.
The only benefit it might have is throttling of network connections, be it torrents (which you can throttle manually, unless you're an idiot) or downloads (Firefox has a plugin to throttle, and I'm sure it can be done with IE, somehow).
hooflung - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
In fact, it doesn't do TCP/IP offloading the way you think. It does UDP offloading. That is why your EVE test is flawed. EVE uses a TCP not UDP because it needs a guaranteed connection. The Xeno and original Killer claim WoW FPS goes up, specifically in Really overworked zones, because it offloads that UDP to the NPU.So thanks for your totally crap review filled with misinformation.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Actually, bigfoot makes it very clear that it's the whole network stack that is offloaded. this includes TCP and UDP. which is also why it has a separate mode for applications that expect a dedicated software network stack.In fact, the WoW example is important, as they told us that WoW uses TCP and NOT UDP -- thus it was not specifically detected as a "game" application (it's the "unknown" blip in the bandwidth control pages).
The Killer Xeno is definitely able to offload TCP because, as we showed, it reduced WoW latency (and potentially could benefit overall performance in heavily populated areas).
I'm not sure whether EVE uses TCP or UDP, but it doesn't matter -- the Killer Xeno Pro should handle both just fine.
hooflung - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Funny that, since I have played EVE Online for nearly 6 years and also have had a killer NIC since they came out.I have talked to their engineers and they told me that the Driver does not do TCP accelleration unlike UDP. Also, WoW uses UDP unless the WoW developers are wrong, which I doubt, and the Bigfoot engineer I talked to, aka the guy who designed it who also put a few hundred million into Intel's pocket by creating the offload engine for the Intel Server NIC's is wrong.
I'll just assume you got your facts mixed up. Also, EVE absolutely uses TCP. If you for a single moment loose your TCP connection you will disconnect. You don't from WoW... because they use UDP after you handshake and authenticate to their login server.