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Bigfoot Networks Killer NIC Review
by Ryan Shrout
PC Perspective.com -
Dec 29, 2006 - I can honestly tell you that I never
thought I would be writing a review of a network card. In my seven
years of reviewing hardware for PC Perspective (and Amdmb.com),
with all the CPUs, video cards and motherboards, there are some
items I just thought were as good as they got. USB, hard drives
and network cards all seemed to just "be
there" and worked the way they were supposed to work. As USB
2.0 implementations varried from chipset to chipset and as Western
Digital unvieled their 10,000 RPM Raptor drives the component performance
was improved. And it looks like we might finally have seen an enthusiast-based
networking advancement as well.
What if you could replace your standard on-board Gigabit Ethernet
with a network card that promised lower pings, higher frame rates
in your games and some very interesting expansion possibilities,
would you be interested? What if that card was $250? I'll try to
help you decide if the new Bigfoot Networks Killer NIC is for you.
BigFoot Networks
A new company started in 2005,
Bigfoot Networks is a new comer to the world of hardware and enthusiasts.
For a quick history, I'll quote the Bigfoot
Networks website:
Harlan "Tytus" Beverly was sick
of playing games online and suffering from Lag. He hated losing
due to circumstances out of his control. As a network architect,
Harlan had the skills and expertise to research where Lag was
occurring and began to talk to game developers on ways Lag could
be fought. The fruits of his work became the foundation for LLR
Technology.
While in business school at the University
of Texas, Harlan teamed up with Bob Grim and Mike Cubbage to
found Bigfoot Networks. Together they wrote an award winning
business plan that won prizes in the Fortune Magazine New Venture
contest, the University of Texas MOOT CORP Competition, San Diego
State’s Venture Challenge, and
the Carnegie Mellon competition.
The prize money combined with Angel investment allowed Harlan
to further refine the technology and for Bigfoot Networks to build
its first prototype, which was critical in securing a $4MM investment
from Venio Capital Partners in late 2005.
Financially secure, Bigfoot Networks has now launched full throttle
on its mission to fight Lag and provide gamers with technology
that can dramatically improve the performance of their gaming systems.
Stay tuned for more details on its upcoming product launch (this
summer), and other ways that Bigfoot Networks is going to make
gaming more fun.
Their goals are lofty: "fight lag" and to "improve
gaming system performance" and achieving them isn't easy,
otherwise someone else would have done it by now.
As we saw when AGEIA
introduced the world's first dedicate physics processor, Bigfoot is giving the world a new acronym to learn;
the NPU or network processing unit. The goal of such a processor
is simple: to offload the networking processing that would usually
be left to the main CPU, allowing it instead to work on other game
processing. In theory, this makes perfect sense and we can see
how increased frame rates (more power for the CPU to use on the
game) could be possible.
But another key to the Killer NIC technology
is the ability to bypass the typical Windows networking stack.
The Killer NIC software replaces the majority of the software
stack and offers up instant "ready
flags" that can answer the game software's requests for networking
data faster than Windows could provide it. We'll explain more on
this later in the review, but the diagram above is a high level
representation of what Bigfoot Networks is trying to do. The flow
chart represents typical game code and you can see that the Killer
NIC card replaces much of the networking logic and is able to store
the "gamer's state" locally instead of in main system
memory.
The NPU from Bigfoot Networks is located
on a PCI-based add-in card seen here. The hardware on the card
consists of a 400 MHz off the shelf Power PC core that runs an
optimized version of embedded Linux to handle the networking
code as required. A single USB 2.0 port is located on the rear
of the card to provide some advanced accessibility features that
we'll look into later in the review. The heatsink is in a unique "K" shape
and looks good as well as being completely passive adding no
noise to your system. A couple of memory chips supply a total
of 64MB of DDR memory to support the NPU and hold the current
state of the networking stack.
Click to Enlarge
Finally, here is a table of some claimed performance changes when
using a Killer NIC; there are no other system specs listed here
so we'll have to wait for our own benchmarks later in the review
for the full report. In the table, blue represents a positive change
for Bigfoot Networks, green neutral and red for negative.
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