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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marsbound2024 - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
"Let's start by saying that this isn't going to be a network card for someone hanging on to a 7 Series NVIDIA card or a Radeon 1k part from ATI in a single core CPU system."Dang...did you guys sneak into my house last night and check out my computer? I've yet to upgrade from my antiquated 7600GT, Athlon64 3800+ 2.4GHz single-core processor! The time to upgrade is nigh though. I've been hanging on to that system for a while now because it does everything I need it to at the moment with Windows XP. After work, I don't really care about coming home and doing anything CPU intensive on my PC and I play my games on console. However, Crysis Warhead and such have led me to continue to want to get a new system.
Atechie - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
1. Eve Oneline is TCP, games that benefit are UDP based.2. "Since we can't get an assessment of ping times in EVE, we did some testing on WoW in the same unpopulated area. Normalized to the average latency we experienced while not downloading a torrent, here's the latency incurred by downloading a torrent"
Unpopulated, not stressing area...why bother is yoo are going to scew the test?
3. Clueless reviewer
4. profit?
Looking at this test it almost look as it was meant to be a less than stellar test
DerekWilson - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
The killer benefits both UDP and TCP games ... not just one or the other.We tested in an unpopulated area in WoW in order to keep things as deterministic as possible. Some of the tests we ran were not strictly deterministic, but it is incredibly hard to construct tests that work in populated areas that generate usable data at all.
the WoW test, even in an unpopulated area, did show that there is a difference in network performance while downloading a torrent. We didn't see this sort of difference while not downloading a torrent, however.
The real issue is that proper testing almost needs to be in a clean room sort of environment where multiple scenarios can be played back across the network and on the PC to show what the actual differences in performance would have been.
But even when that shows some actual performance differences (as I believe it would) the benefits just don't present themselves to the end user in any truly beneficial way.
DigitalFreak - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Quit your whining. Derek has already responded to these issues.hooflung - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
And Derek was wrong. At least I am not the only one who pointed this out.DerekWilson - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Once again --EVE uses both TCP and UDP and not just TCP. WoW, it seems by all accounts I can find online, uses only TCP.
Aside from this, the Killer hardware accelerates both TCP and UDP not just one or the other, so the whole issue doesn't matter one bit.
stmok - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
While I can see why they tried to target the gaming market, it just feels like its more suited for server or hacker/enthusiast audience. (So I agree with the author in that regard.)The irony of this product is that, while it uses an embedded version of Linux on the NIC, it isn't fully supported under Linux! ie: Say if you used Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, or "whatever is your fav distro" in your system; you wouldn't be able to have full access to all its features! Its a "Windows only" thing!
The product has potential...It just feels the company is focusing on an audience who won't really appreciate what the product can do. Its kind of wasted in that sense.
trochevs - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
I agree. Until they open the access to the embedded OS and other people and hackers develop apps for it it will be doomed.If I had access to the hardware I would install scaled down version of my web server LAMP and shutdown the main PC. If the traffic jumps I would wake the main server and handle the demand.
Other cool use could be to upload the Asterisk and have 24/7 VoIP PBX without the need to run the PC 24/7
How about to run my torrent server without running the PC.
And the end. Keep the PC in hibernate and when I need it for remote access I can connect to the NIC and wake it up.
This has wonderful potentials, but until Xeno executives wake up from their dream to become the next Gates or Jobs with proprietary platform this would be yet one more great idea and impressive engineering that never going to see light of the day.
Open platform please. Just like the PC.
Stas - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Would be silly to bother with support for Linux when this is marketed as a GAMING product. Windows makes sense.stmok - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
"Would be silly to bother with support for Linux when this is marketed as a GAMING product. Windows makes sense."=> What kind of gamer would take the time to download the SDK for this product and help develop applications for the hardware?
This is EXACTLY what I mean when I say the product is aimed at the wrong market. Gamers won't bother. Gamers aren't developers.
Than again, how much sense does Windows make when you are replacing its network stack with this?