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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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.