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Originally posted by cerebrix
as skeptical as i can be about things like this.  especially considering my professional history in the tech industry.  my ears did perk up and take notice after reading this article at hardocp.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTIzOSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
 
kyle has one of the best bs meters ive seen in the industry.  the guys known for calling people out when they let their mouths get ahead of their products.
theres something to their product.  if there wasnt.  kyle would have said so.

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Again, as you can see there's been no recent reviews on their new cards, only product announcements...all reviews found are always about the first generation card.

and kyle will cover that too.  you can be sure of that.  bigfoot networks has offices in austin.  thats where they gave kyle a demo the last time.

i'm sure he'll ask to see it and if they say no, thing about kyle is, he'll make a post on the front page of hardocp to mention they said no.

or steve will meniton it =p.

either way, kyle always has our backs.

i think the biggest performance their seeing though is the bypassing of the windows networking stack.  it uses its own, considering how bad the windows stack is at concurrent connections this isnt a stretch by any means.  i still plan on getting one for myself.

I am still considering getting one and have been since they first came out, however I'd rather have a PCIe x1 sound card -- as my mobo has one specifically for that purpose -- they should have made these new PCIe card x16...yes I know a x1 card can fit in a x16 slot but that's not the point.

Originally posted by Salvatoris

As a network engineer, I can't believe these guys are still in business.  This card is unnecessary and overpriced.   You can get a decent gigabit NIC for a fraction of the cost and I guarantee you will not be able to see the difference.   If your system is so low on resources that the NIC can't do it's job, you could better spend your hard earned cash on a RAM upgrade. 

Most people have a NIC that can handle 10x the throughput of their internet connection... and even if you were to waste your money and buy this overpriced card, are you going to be able to talk your ISP in to upgrading all their network equipment too?  We are talking about a couple of milliseconds response time here, and even that is being generous IM-professional-O. :)

I guess the market for their cards is people with more money than brains.

couldnt agree more with this. this card wont do squat to eliminate network lag unless it can fix all the hardware between you and the game server.

most all PCs and Laptops these days have gigabit cards on them. I have the highest throughput option from my internet carrier 18mbps / 1.5 mbps. Even with it pegged on speedtest I cant utilize more than a few percent of the onboard cards real potential.

This is the most unbiased review I found and they cant find a reason to spend $200 on it.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/478/1/

This is such a marketing scam. $200! For real? Do yourself a favor and upgrade your video card, processor, or buy some more ram.

I think you could just make money selling flashy "PIMP" PCI cards. I think the only thing that sells these cards is the chrome K  that reflects some neon from the cold cathode or whatever. PCI fog machines, thats what would really reduce your lag. The fog would make the air more dense and thus improve cooling of the components allowing for better performance. I swear. In a week bet these babies are on sale somewhere.  

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Originally posted by slipline

This is the most unbiased review I found and they cant find a reason to spend $200 on it.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/478/1/
This is such a marketing scam. $200! 

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Look at the date of the review, they are reviewing the original PCI cards, I am not defending BFN, just pointing out any reviews you find will be for the original cards and not for their new PCIe XENO series.

Originally posted by mlauzon

 

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Originally posted by slipline

This is the most unbiased review I found and they cant find a reason to spend $200 on it.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/478/1/
This is such a marketing scam. $200! 

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Look at the date of the review, they are reviewing the original PCI cards, I am not defending BFN, just pointing out any reviews you find will be for the original cards and not for their new PCIe XENO series.

 

Your network card is not going to give you any considerable jump in performance by going to pcie vs PCI vs integrated on board and probably, for home usage ISA was enough. I do like the concept of these things but for anyone in the market for a $200+ network card you really dont need it. You can get any of the following upgrades for the same or less money: 

• 8gb Ram - $160 or less
• Quadcore Proc - $180
• VelociRaptor Hard Drive - $180
• Radeon 4870w ddr5 - $170
• SuperClocked GTX260 - $200

IMO any of those items would vastly increase framerate and reduce percieved lag more than the killer nic. With the price point of the items above (and they are going to go lower due to economy and all the politics in Tiwan/china right now)  I just dont see the value in the Killer product at this time. If they put it at a more reasonable $50-75 I might think about it as an option. Even at that you can buy a 4gb memory kit for less than $70 right now. 8gb of ram lets you turn off your swap file in windows which will give you a noticable increase in performance.

With older machines that get a lower ping 200-300+ms the card might and I stress might help. The reviews on sites like new egg where you see what real users say are very mixed. The big improvements appear to come from those with older rigs.

I also wonder why you dont see more up toi date reviews of this product if it is so awesome.

Well, you can see my computer specs in my sig...so you know I have a high-end machine.

I am still not a big fan of onboard anything, so would I get the Ultra version of the card...maybe; I don't plan on doing triple crossfire -- yes my mobo actually supports it -- and so I have a PCIe slot free to possibly get an add-in card.

Originally posted by mlauzon

Well, you can see my computer specs in my sig...so you know I have a high-end machine.

I am still not a big fan of onboard anything, so would I get the Ultra version of the card...maybe; I don't plan on doing triple crossfire -- yes my mobo actually supports it -- and so I have a PCIe slot free to possibly get an add-in card.

 

cant wait to see the ping benchmarks. i guess the real test will be if 20-30ms is really that noticable in any of the games. If I had your rig I wouldnt waste the $$ on it but I am curious. If the thing could take my pings from the 20s to the single digits I might think about it too. Or if it offered 10-20fps under heavy population evniornments like cities in most major mmos, or raid events.

My box doesnt really compare well to yours but I have

8gb viper ram 4-4-4-12
q6600 @ 3.0ghz
Saphire 4870 1gb

And I dont find lag to be much of an issue for me. Seeing as how you ahve pretty much topped everything else out I guess the lan card is about all you could stick in there besides maybe water cool and overclock the shit out of everything. :) 

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Originally posted by cerebrix
and kyle will cover that too.  you can be sure of that.  bigfoot networks has offices in austin.  thats where they gave kyle a demo the last time.
 
i'm sure he'll ask to see it and if they say no, thing about kyle is, he'll make a post on the front page of hardocp to mention they said no.
 
or steve will meniton it =p.
 
either way, kyle always has our backs.
 
i think the biggest performance their seeing though is the bypassing of the windows networking stack.  it uses its own, considering how bad the windows stack is at concurrent connections this isnt a stretch by any means.  i still plan on getting one for myself.

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Actually, Kyle won't be reviewing a KillerNIC card again....

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Originally posted by slipline
cant wait to see the ping benchmarks. i guess the real test will be if 20-30ms is really that noticable in any of the games. If I had your rig I wouldnt waste the $$ on it but I am curious. If the thing could take my pings from the 20s to the single digits I might think about it too. Or if it offered 10-20fps under heavy population evniornments like cities in most major mmos, or raid events.

My box doesnt really compare well to yours but I have

8gb viper ram 4-4-4-12
q6600 @ 3.0ghz
Saphire 4870 1gb

And I dont find lag to be much of an issue for me. Seeing as how you ahve pretty much topped everything else out I guess the lan card is about all you could stick in there besides maybe water cool and overclock the shit out of everything. :) 

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Never said I would get the card, I said I'd consider getting one...but I'd like to see some reviews on the cards first -- not reviews from the original cards either -- and then decide from there.

Originally posted by Hashbrick

The problem is, is people think this "magical" card is just going to obliterate lag which as someone stated is wildly thrown out of context and is no general definition anymore. At any rate as the technology is now the performance is minimal and barely noticeable. You want better performance get a better ISP nuff said.

Want to jump in here really quick - we've never said we can fix all lag - you should be wary of people who say that they can.  However - we can fight lag in at least one of the places it lives and where it's pretty big - on the client.  By bypassing the Windows Network Stack, offloading network operations from the CPU, providing per-process packet prioritization through the network processing unit and providing direct hardware interrupts to the game the instant packets arrive, we see a 20-30% performance increase in online games, not only in latency, but also in framerate.

If it were magic, it would fix the Internet, and it can't do that.

Yet.

<blockquote><i>Originally posted by Salvatoris</i> <br />
<b>
<p>As a network engineer, I can't believe these guys are still in business.  This card is unnecessary and overpriced.   You can get a decent gigabit NIC for a fraction of the cost and I guarantee you will not be able to see the difference.   If your system is so low on resources that the NIC can't do it's job, you could better spend your hard earned cash on a RAM upgrade. </p>
<p>Most people have a NIC that can handle 10x the throughput of their internet connection... and even if you were to waste your money and buy this overpriced card, are you going to be able to talk your ISP in to upgrading all their network equipment too?  We are talking about a couple of milliseconds response time here, and even that is being generous IM-professional-O. :)</p>
<p>I guess the market for their cards is people with more money than brains.</p>
</b></blockquote>
<p>You can get a "decent Gigabit NIC" for less than a Killer Xeno.  Our founder and CTO designed them at Intel, and started Bigfoot because a "decent Gigabit NIC" does nothing to improve latency in online games.<br />
<br />
You are correct - most people have a built-in NIC that can handle the throughput of their Internet connections.  However, these NICs are:</p>
<p> - essentially "dumb" - they rely on instructions from Windows and CPU resources to operate (except for the aforementioned expansion NICs and high-end TOE cards)</p>
<p> - designed to optimize <em>throughput </em>and not latency.<br />
<br />
Windows is good at many things - like getting you a 300MB file in a reasonable amount of time across a network or Internet connection.  It's not so good at getting you a small UDP packet (like, say, an incoming bullet or a chat message that says "HEAL PLZ!!!") in the instant that your game requires it.  Windows is concerned about saving you a minute or so here and there, not about saving you from a raid wipe.<br />
<br />
Killer technology, however, bypasses Windows and offloads game networking operations from the CPU.  Most importantly, it delivers those important game packets the instant they arrive directly to the game - smoothing out the chunkiness of your game experience and improving your framerate as well as your latency.</p>
<p>As seen in reviews in PC Gamer:</p>
<p>http://www.killernic.com/killernic/PDFs/PC_Gamer_Review.pdf<br />
(PDF link!)</p>
<p>or here in CPU:</p>
<p>http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/archive/c0705/09b05/09b05.asp</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Thanks for the questions and the opportunity to reply!</p>
<p> </p>

Originally posted by BigfootSean

Originally posted by Hashbrick

The problem is, is people think this "magical" card is just going to obliterate lag which as someone stated is wildly thrown out of context and is no general definition anymore. At any rate as the technology is now the performance is minimal and barely noticeable. You want better performance get a better ISP nuff said.

Want to jump in here really quick - we've never said we can fix all lag - you should be wary of people who say that they can.  However - we can fight lag in at least one of the places it lives and where it's pretty big - on the client.  By bypassing the Windows Network Stack, offloading network operations from the CPU, providing per-process packet prioritization through the network processing unit and providing direct hardware interrupts to the game the instant packets arrive, we see a 20-30% performance increase in online games, not only in latency, but also in framerate.

If it were magic, it would fix the Internet, and it can't do that.

Yet.

Why havent we seen more real world and hands on reviews of the products recently? 

I think this from Anand sums it up;

"This is the real irony of the Killer NIC as the systems that show the greatest amount of improvement (in a very limited number of titles) belong to owners that would never consider spending $279.99 on a NIC. Those who can afford the card are probably running system specifications in which the game performance improvements would never be noticed. In fact, we could simply overclock our systems by 5% or a little more and end up with the same frame rate improvements. That leaves a very small audience of buyers who would potentially purchase the card for the gee-whiz factor or the professional gamer who has the ability to take advantage of a 1ms or better improvement in ping rates in Counter Strike: Source or could tell the difference between 58 fps or 53 fps in F.E.A.R.." 

The deal with Dell / Alienware is good for you guys though. Not sure how much margin you had to give away for that but you will probably sell alot of the cards to the "maximum" crowd. Tons of those XPS guys just config the box with every slot full of whatever is the most expensive and buy it. The same crowd that buys into physics cards and what not.

As for the reviews you posted, no self respecting gamer believes anything PC Gamer says because they will review anyone highly if you buy add space. I hadnt even heard of computer power user, probably a reason for that. Oh yeah! "Sandhills Publishing Company ".

 Remember, not all latency lives on the Internet or server - lots of it resides on the client, and that's where the Killer fights it.

Yes, back in the day when we all played Quake over copper, line lag was a big problem, and lag was attributed to a high ping.

But even a player with a <20 ping to his favorite server can still experience client-side lag, because the Windows Network Stack is optimized for throughput, not latency.  Multiple game messages are coalesced into bigger packets, no matter how important they are, then copied to multiple places in the Windows Network Stack before finally being written into user space.

So if your game immediately gets half a dozen UDP packets in 1 operation, while it was idle the past six operations, it might drop a frame (or three, or 20) while it carries out those simultaneous operations.

With a Killer, UDP packets for straight to the game - no coalescing, no waiting.  The game gets a packet and keeps on going.  This results in smoother gameplay and faster framerates, as seen in multiple reviews:

PC Gamer:

http://www.killernic.com/killernic/PDFs/PC_Gamer_Review.pdf  (PDF Link)

CPU:

http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/archive/c0705/09b05/09b05.asp

Thanks for the opportunity to reply!
 

Your network card is not going to give you any considerable jump in performance by going to pcie vs PCI vs integrated on board and probably, for home usage ISA was enough. I do like the concept of these things but for anyone in the market for a $200+ network card you really dont need it. You can get any of the following upgrades for the same or less money: 

• 8gb Ram - $160 or less
• Quadcore Proc - $180
• VelociRaptor Hard Drive - $180
• Radeon 4870w ddr5 - $170
• SuperClocked GTX260 - $200

IMO any of those items would vastly increase framerate and reduce percieved lag more than the killer nic. With the price point of the items above (and they are going to go lower due to economy and all the politics in Tiwan/china right now)  I just dont see the value in the Killer product at this time. If they put it at a more reasonable $50-75 I might think about it as an option. Even at that you can buy a 4gb memory kit for less than $70 right now. 8gb of ram lets you turn off your swap file in windows which will give you a noticable increase in performance.

With older machines that get a lower ping 200-300+ms the card might and I stress might help. The reviews on sites like new egg where you see what real users say are very mixed. The big improvements appear to come from those with older rigs.

I also wonder why you dont see more up toi date reviews of this product if it is so awesome.

 

Wanted to reply to one thing here - you've listed a quad-core processor as a fix to framerate or lag.  The problem is this: you can't "out-core" lag.

Since networking is a kernel-level operation, there are two things that multiple cores can't address:

 - networking is always run on core zero (first core,) with no ability to farm it out to the other cores through better optimization

 - when games look for a network packet, all the cores have to synchronize, thereby halting the game for a time while they wait for the Windows Network Stack to pass the kernel over.

So we essentially have machines today that are hundreds of times faster than they were ten years ago, but still halt at the same rate.  It doesn't matter that your machine can handle orders of magnitude more instructions - if it still gets thos instructions choppily, it's going to behave choppily.

Thanks for the opportunity to reply!

Originally posted by BigfootSean

Your network card is not going to give you any considerable jump in performance by going to pcie vs PCI vs integrated on board and probably, for home usage ISA was enough. I do like the concept of these things but for anyone in the market for a $200+ network card you really dont need it. You can get any of the following upgrades for the same or less money: 

• 8gb Ram - $160 or less
• Quadcore Proc - $180
• VelociRaptor Hard Drive - $180
• Radeon 4870w ddr5 - $170
• SuperClocked GTX260 - $200

IMO any of those items would vastly increase framerate and reduce percieved lag more than the killer nic. With the price point of the items above (and they are going to go lower due to economy and all the politics in Tiwan/china right now)  I just dont see the value in the Killer product at this time. If they put it at a more reasonable $50-75 I might think about it as an option. Even at that you can buy a 4gb memory kit for less than $70 right now. 8gb of ram lets you turn off your swap file in windows which will give you a noticable increase in performance.

With older machines that get a lower ping 200-300+ms the card might and I stress might help. The reviews on sites like new egg where you see what real users say are very mixed. The big improvements appear to come from those with older rigs.

I also wonder why you dont see more up toi date reviews of this product if it is so awesome.

 

Wanted to reply to one thing here - you've listed a quad-core processor as a fix to framerate or lag.  The problem is this: you can't "out-core" lag.

Since networking is a kernel-level operation, there are two things that multiple cores can't address:

 - networking is always run on core zero (first core,) with no ability to farm it out to the other cores through better optimization

 - when games look for a network packet, all the cores have to synchronize, thereby halting the game for a time while they wait for the Windows Network Stack to pass the kernel over.

 

So we essentially have machines today that are hundreds of times faster than they were ten years ago, but still halt at the same rate.  It doesn't matter that your machine can handle orders of magnitude more instructions - if it still gets thos instructions choppily, it's going to behave choppily.

Thanks for the opportunity to reply!

The whole point is that 2ms of ping time , or 5FPS increase is trivial at best, even more so in the MMO world. The other options would offer you a better overall game experience.

This horse has been beat by the best reviewers in the industry and the killer nic / technology never offers more than a blip on the radar of improvement. Come back here with some reviews from the MMOs that we all play. Hell send me a card, I sub to about 6 paid MMOs and several free ones. I will be glad to review the card with honest results and send it back. Ill even post a video of performance improvements on YouTube and buy the card if it impresses me. Otherwise, the reviews are in from the big boys and they say... dont waste your money.

 The whole point is that 2ms of ping time , or 5FPS increase is trivial at best, even more so in the MMO world. The other options would offer you a better overall game experience.

This horse has been beat by the best reviewers in the industry and the killer nic / technology never offers more than a blip on the radar of improvement. Come back here with some reviews from the MMOs that we all play. Hell send me a card, I sub to about 6 paid MMOs and several free ones. I will be glad to review the card with honest results and send it back. Ill even post a video of performance improvements on YouTube and buy the card if it impresses me. Otherwise, the reviews are in from the big boys and they say... dont waste your money.

Heck, MMORPG.com reviewed our K1:

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/1214

The author gave it two thumbs up, or if you prefer, the "Golden Orc Toe of MMORPG.com approval."
 

And you can always check out the whole list right here:

http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/reviews-and-awards/

Thanks!

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Originally posted by BigfootSean

Heck, MMORPG.com reviewed our K1:
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/1214
The author gave it two thumbs up, or if you prefer, the "Golden Orc Toe of MMORPG.com approval."
 
And you can always check out the whole list right here:
http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/reviews-and-awards/
 
Thanks!
 

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Be that as it may, no one wants to review your new XENO line, doesn't that tell you something; hell give me a free XENO Ultra and I'll play with it in my 5K system..?!