EVGA Killer Xeno Pro: The Impact of Network Offloading
by Derek Wilson on July 3, 2009 4:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Networking
Bigfoot Networks has, for the past few years, been trying very hard to bring high powered, intelligent network interface cards to the desktop. We previously looked at their Killer NIC with some interesting results, and today we've got the Killer Xeno Pro in our labs.
The major difference between the older Killer NIC and the newer Killer Xeno Pro is the inclusion of an audio path and audio processing for voice chat acceleration. They Killer Xeno Pro also has twice the RAM of the original. Despite the improvements, one of the major benefits is that the Killer Xeno Pro will be available at a lower retail price than the Killer NIC was. Oh, and it is sort of cool to see the new hardware dialog talking about a PowerPC Processor:
I sooo want to hack this thing now.
In our original investigation, we did see some situations where the Killer NIC could make some difference, but, for what you get, the cost was much too high. One of the ways that Bigfoot is trying to combat this is by selling chipsets and letting vendors like EVGA build and market boards. They've managed to get their costs down and the price of the Killer Xeno Pro, while very high for a network card, is much more reasonable than the original offering. The EVGA Killer Xeno Pro can be had for about $120 USD.
The EVGA Killer Xeno Pro in all its glory.
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. When upgrading, spending the $120 cost of the Killer Xeno Pro on a better graphics card will net you a great deal more performance. Even putting that money into the CPU is likely to get you more for your money in general. This is a card that should be targeted at the online gamer with a good system who wants to make sure every possible advantage is covered.
This hardware at this price is just not for everyone. It still needs to come down to more of a commodity price in order to see wider adoption. In our opinion, those who should even consider this card should already have a modern dual core system with single GPU graphics hardware capable of delivering a good, steady, high framerate at the preferred resolution in the majority of games. We don't expect that everyone who has such a system will want to invest in the Killer Xeno Pro either, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.
Up first we will look at the Killer Xeno Pro, its features, and why we should expect some level of increased performance at all from a typical network card.
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crimson117 - Friday, July 03, 2009 - link
I looked it up too!WoW similarly uses TCP for gameplay and UDP for voice support:
From http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=...">http://us.blizzard.com/support/article....cleId=21...
What do I need to know about ports?
Anytime your computer receives incoming data, it is sent to a "port". Your computer has many ports that can receive data, and different activities will utilize different ports. World of Warcraft & Burning Crusade use TCP port numbers 1119 and 3724 to play, and UDP port 3724 for in game Voice chat. The Blizzard Downloader, which downloads patches, also uses TCP ports 6112 and the range 6881-6999. For walkthroughs on router and firewall configuration you can use the Networking Help for the Blizzard Downloader page. Reply
ShannonG - Saturday, January 30, 2010 - link
It is hard to believe any major MMORPG uses TCP for situational updates. Logging in, updates, billing, web, etc... sure.But for for game updates? 90% of it is real-time and redundant.
I don't play WoW, but if you routinely experience "warping" now you know why - craptastic network architecture.
A MMORPG with a well-designed network infrastructure will use a [custom] selectively-reliable UDP protocol, colloquially referred to as "RUDP".
If the card actually could/does off-load the networking stack [including firewalling et. al.] you stand to recapture 5%-10% of the CPU if it is bandwidth intensive.
Most games are not bandwidth intensive, quite the opposite; and it cannot significantly improve latency - that latency delays of the Internet will swamp the latency delays of packet delivery (ms vs us).
What this card will do is move the packet processing from whatever system bus your NIC is currently on to the ePCI bus. That's probably not a good thing either - the video card is on that bus. Reply
Stas - Friday, July 03, 2009 - link
Given the return on the investment, I would pay $25 for this NIC at the most. Not $100+ (shit, I might as well go for an Intel dual Gigabit LAN NIC, if I'm to spend over $100). ReplyDerekWilson - Friday, July 03, 2009 - link
There is typically a baseline cost to add-in network hardware ... if you need something to put in your box, you'll probably spend at least $25-$30 just to get something equivalent to what's on most motherboards. Replybigboxes - Friday, July 03, 2009 - link
I just replaced my gigabit card on my file server with a new Linksys gigabit card. $30. No, my mobo only had 10/100, so I had to purchase the card. I remeber that D-Link's was $25 and Netgear was $20. The U.S. Robotics card was $15, but seeing as that was the card that just failed I tried the Linksys route. ReplyDerekWilson - Friday, July 03, 2009 - link
So maybe $20 - $30 ... :-) but still, you've got to pay something for just the PCB, the port, and the chips ... I certainly agree that for what it delivers in realized performance the $100 premium is too much for the Killer Xeno Pro ... but it is definitely more reasonable than their first offering. Replygeekfool - Friday, July 03, 2009 - link
As a gaming enhancement this appears to be of dubious worth, at best. However, as a server nic the prioritization could be useful, particularly for a multiuse file, game and/or web server. The ultimate worth might be best determined if the test workload is specifically tailored to fit the abilities of this card and then deciding if that profile fits a particular need. A backwards approach, but probably the only way to distinguish any usefulness. ReplyDerekWilson - Friday, July 03, 2009 - link
This could definitely be interesting and is something we would like to look into.we do really want to test with more than one card to see how it changes overall network performance. Reply
hyc - Monday, July 06, 2009 - link
In my experience, having done a lot of heavy load testing on servers, you're only going to see any difference when you're near saturation of the network fabric. I.e., you need to be pushing enough packets to be at over 60% of the network's packet-per-second limit before you'll see any performance difference from any offload engine. For gigabit ethernet the maximum frame rate (at minimum frame size) is about 1.488M packets/sec. At anything less than 10% network utilization I doubt you'll even be able to measure the CPU overhead of network processing. ReplyShadowmage - Friday, July 03, 2009 - link
This is a horribly misleading article. The claim is that the card is better than standard networking cards, yet the author never tests the card against its competitors - add-in card NICs.Would you test a new graphics card against integrated graphics? Reply