Bigfoot Networks Lag Boot Camp Report
Some time ago, our own Carolyn Koh attended Bigfoot Networks' Boot Camp. Today, she files her report.
Bigfoot's mission was to educate us about lag. A term all MMO gamers are familiar with. That's the term we use to describe the frustrating anomalies in the online games we play that are usually blamed on internet latency. The rubber-bending of mobs, the game freezing, the stuttering of our screens. The time that elapses between when we type in some text and when it shows on our screen. The slight pause in our game when someone speaks over ventrilo or one of the other voice chat programs we use and the dreaded link-death, when we actually lose connection with the server long enough to be kicked out of the game. All those symptoms are what we simply call lag.
Lag, we were told, has three components to it:
- Server side – where game servers optimize for player load.
- Client side – where PCs may be bloated with applications that are running in the back ground taking up memory and CPU processing power or just not enough RAM or processing power.
- Network – which is the pipe through which we are connected to the internet, that is bandwith (how fast your throughput is) and latency issues, that is the number of hops, skips and jumps away the game server is from your machine.
One of the problems is that there is no metric that’s readily available to measure lag. Sure, you can measure in-game frames per second and ping, but neither actually measures lag. As lag is about the responsiveness of the game and is comprised of the “pipe” as well as the “fittings.” That is to say, the connection as well as the all the hardware components that are part of delivering the real time experience to the gamer.
The Bigfoot sponsored blog, www.endlagnow.org has a page of tips and a downloadable White Paper written by Harlan Beverly of BigFoot on lag. There are several things a gamer can do to improve his game’s performance and hence his gaming experience.
- Improve your ISP. Remember playing MMOs on dialup? Or maybe you were lucky enough to miss that pain. A broadband connection such as DSL and Cable or better will perform better than dialup. A tweak also would be to stop all other programs from doing any background downloads while you are playing. Who among our readers had had Adobe, Windows or Virus Protection Updater lag us out? Or worse… re-start your computer on you! FiOS – Fiber Optic Service is usually more bandwidth and lower latency than signals over copper.
- Improve your PC’s computing power and RAM. Keep in mind the point of diminishing returns and what your OS can handle. Other tweaks here include making sure all un-needed applications are turned off while you are playing. All those applications on your system tray eat up RAM.
- Better internet pathways and servers. Half and half here. Players can control the server they play on to minimize the length of the route and the hops, skips and jumps data has to take before getting to you. If you live in Europe and want to minimize lag, you’d do better to play on an European server, not one located in Singapore or California, despite where your friends are. On the other hand, the servers themselves are controlled by the game companies. Old EverQuest players might even remember the pain of playing on a server (Bristlebane and others) that was an older or more congested machine.
- Better game design. This is one for the developers as games can be optimized for minimum lag and BigFoot is working on new metrics to measure lag and their current LagMeter may be found here. Using FRAPS to measure frame rate per second, counting a lag event if fps falls below 60fps, if Ping is greater than 50ms and if back to back ping is greater than 100ms. LagMeter measures “lags per minute.”
Creating the exact same scenario in order to properly control, compare and benchmark internet gaming performance is near impossible. For one, there are no benchmarks available at this time, besides the in-game frame rate and ping meter. For another, the traffic or other events going on in the pipe cannot be controlled.
Bigfoot at this time is developing another benchmarking tool, NetGameTest which will be available on their website soon. A user-run benchmark, it records for ten minutes then parses all the information and provides a score. In basic mode, it is a hardware stress test and shows average FPS and Ping over the length of the test. There will also be an advanced mode where different variables will be able to be tweaked.
We were also shown way more technical stuff than this attendee is comfortable explaining here with lovely acronyms such as TCPIPOE / TDP / UDP / TOE, seven layer OSI and a graphical slide showing the Windows Stack... my eyes began to glaze over. But what was important to me as an online gamer was that the Killer NIC (that’s Network Interface Card by the way) worked to reduce lag. The closest Bigfoot could get to for a visual demonstration was to set up two identical machines, one with the KillerNIC installed and one without. Then two new characters were spawned in World of Warcraft – one on top of the other. Now without moving either character, we performed jump tests. No matter which character it was jumping, the machine with the KillerNic installed rendered the character jumping just a few milliseconds faster.
The first generation KillerNIC was reviewed here on MMORPG.com with a nifty explanation of how it works, in layman’s terms. All participants will soon get access to beta NetGameTest and I’ll report on how well it works. In a testimony to the technology, a representative from Dell was also on hand to tell us about their partnership with Bigfoot. All Alienware PCs now ship with a KillerNIC installed, and it is an option available on their Dell brand as well. We of course asked if whether the technology would be available for the laptop since laptop gaming is gaining with mainstream gamers and everyone suddenly shut up and pointed looks were exchanged before we were offered a “keep your ears open for news…”
Problem is that today kids call everything lag.
So when someone complains in general chat : "I have lag" ... it can be anything
Back in the times: LAG = Network Latency ( high ping )
The term is now destroyed. It should be scraped completely
MMORPG.com links to a story it wrote on the KillerNIC, however we all know how that turned out...a big fat fail!
Did it though? I thought the jury was still out on this?
Quite a few sites have now reviewed this card so what's the final outcome?
LagMeter may be found here.
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The only one that was every really reviewed was the original...all the sites that I've found through Google are not doing a 'review' but more of a product announcement.
Any attempt I made to download their 'lagmeter' failed in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. In order to do this you have to supply an email address. The download link goes directly to Bigfoot Networks, the KillerNIC company's website. Each attempt I made stated the page didn't exist. There is no mention of a 'lagmeter' anywhere on Bigfoot Networks website. At this time it looks more like a company fishing for email addresses.
The most recent review,dated January 2009, of the KillerNIC is here. Essentially it says you /might/ see a 5% improvement in 'lag' if you stay out of busy areas in your mmorpg and have a marginal computer. This minor improvement is worth a score of 8.8 out of 10. Here's the summary paragraph of that 'review'.
"All in all, the Killer NIC is a must have if you’re going to build a high-end gaming rig. As far as simply adding it to boost performance, you might be better served with a faster video card or CPU, as the Killer NIC on an old Pentium 4 was no match for a high end Intel Core 2 Duo for raw frame rate. (emphasis added-grunty) Still, it did beat out the newer computer on ping times in some games, so it might be a worthwhile investment if slashing a few milliseconds off your ping time is what you need to get the most out of your game! Not to mention it looks great, with its stylized K heatsink. Make sure you put this in a computer with a view!
Score: 8.8 (out of 10)"
LAG or lack of LAT was public enemy number one for me. I solved my issues with a simple program I found, I hope it works for you as well as it worked for me.
http://download.cnet.com/SG-TCP-Optimizer/3000-2155_4-10415840.html?tag=mncol
I'm checking on the LagMeter download with Bigfoot. It worked when I filed the report in February.
Cheers
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.
Again, that review is for the original KillerNIC (PCI version), not their new XENO Pro or Ultra both of which are PCIe....
It overjoys me to see other people with the same mentality as me.
I cannot stand what the term has come to and I actively try to defend what 'lag' used to mean. Usually it just ends up with me being attacked by complete ignorance. I've turned to trying to say 'latency' instead of 'lag', but it's harder than it would seem.
Being a PC tech and trying to troubleshoot someone's 'lag' in today's world is just.. ugh.
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.
Gee, no shocker there. Alienware (and subsequently Dell now due to their partnership) have always been into selling horrifically overpriced crap. Their like luxury cars of the PC world, shiny, expensive, and complete shite. If you're stupid enough to pay $100 for a NIC card though, I guess you deserve no better.
Yup one of my highest annoyances in game lately. Heck even fps drops they call lag now.
You cannot just say that about Alienware/Dell, look at all the enthusiast-level computer companies, they are also well overpriced.
You want a weird one, 2 years ago I was playing Rappelz on a Media Centre PC, it had the specs for some games, however to make the game run better I turned all the settings to minimum and started getting major framerate drops, etc. I turned all the settings back to medium and/or high and the game played smoothly.
Rubber Band effect
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.
Its a joke, it always has been. Any reasonable network card handles functions in the same way, theres network standards for a reason, theres only so much you can deviate.
The Killer NIC is an overpriced piece of rubbish, anyone buying one is a fool.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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. :)
Actually, Kyle won't be reviewing a KillerNIC card again....
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.
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>
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!
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!
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.
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!
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..?!