EVGA Killer Xeno Pro: The Impact of Network Offloading
by Derek Wilson on July 3, 2009 4:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Networking
Final Words
The approach and design of the Killer Xeno Pro are more efficient than standard network cards. Bypassing the windows networking stack will reduce load on the operating system and the CPU. Bypassing the CPU and OS when sending and receiving audio using supported voice chat software is a cool thing as well. Built in hardware prioritization (QoS) and bandwidth throttling are also interesting features.
But the bottom line is that none of this makes a significant difference in the gaming experience on modern PCs when paired with current games, nor does it offer an advantage over alternatives.
The biggest advantage the Killer Xeno Pro showed was in it's ability to prioritize games over other applications. At the same time, this only works for the one PC that is doing both downloading and gaming. If there are other computers on the network at all, it would be much more cost effective to purchase a router that can handle QoS and bandwidth control on a per application (or per port) basis. Using a router to handle this means that I can download huge massive files on one PC and my wife can play Team Fortress 2 on another without experiencing problems.
I could even play a game on the computer that I'm downloading with in that case, but it remains our recommendation to simply not download in the background while playing a game. More than just networking is affected by downloading in the background, as the harddrive is constantly being hit and this can be a significant source of loading pauses and hitching in and of itself.
If you don't want to spend any money, most torrent and other downloading applications come with built in (or add on) bandwidth controls that can be employed to achieve the same end as hardware QoS. Hardware QoS and bandwidth control are nice features to have, but they are not worth $120.
The voice chat acceleration could be beneficial when gaming while chatting, but currently most applications are not supported. Teamspeak, Ventrillo, and Skype all need out of the box support at the very least. At best we would want all games with built in voice chat to support this as well, but that isn't likely unless and until the hardware becomes more popular. In addition to application support, voice chat doesn't take up a significant amount of CPU time and the most significant impact on latency is still going to be the network as a whole.
TCP/IP offload is a better way to do things, but the benefit to the gamer just isn't there. Network load just isn't high enough to really take advantage of the hardware in modern games. But it isn't like the potential benefit of an NPU can never be realized: it starts to matter in the server space where technology like this was originally targeted. Offloading the CPU of a heavily loaded database server can definitely leave more CPU time for processing tasks and can increase network responsiveness. This just isn't what the Killer Xeno Pro is targeted towards.
So, when you've already got an on-board network card, is the Killer Xeno Pro worth $120-$130 USD? When that money can be put into either CPU or graphics, the answer just has to be no. At the same price as a Radeon HD 4850, there is just no reason not to look toward upgrading older graphics solutions. If you've already got something on the level of the 4850, then that money should be saved for your next graphics hardware upgrade where it will still have a higher impact on performance and experience.
For professional gamers and those obsessed with twitch shooters, for the gamers running 1280x800 on a 30" panel with most of the settings turned down on the highest end hardware money can buy, for those who are always after whatever option might give them the slightest edge: the Killer Xeno Pro might be for you. But even then, this hardware is the icing on the cake rather than a core ingredient.
What the geek inside me really wants to see is more general access to the hardware. This is, after all, a PC on a PCIe card. If Bigfoot gave us deeper access to the hardware, we might find more (even if equally niche) uses for an extra PowerPC processor in our computers. Additionally, to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, we would like to get our hands on a couple more of these cards in order to do some LAN testing using combinations of standard and Killer network cards to see how overall network performance is changed (if at all) especially with respect to voice chat performance.
Beyond this, there is a caveat. Perhaps, as broadband becomes more pervasive, game developers might want to push networking. At some point in time, games may need the PCs they run on to handle a much larger volume of network traffic in order to function well. Right now, game developers are targeting current bandwidths using current commodity network hardware. Games can't be designed to require higher performance networking gear because consumers either don't have access to high speed internet or they don't have a network card that does TCP/IP offload (among other things).
At some point down the line, something like the Killer Xeno Pro might become a significant requirement. But right now, for the vast majority of gamers out there, our advice is to save your money.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
121 Comments
View All Comments
yyrkoon - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
Not to mention that ToE is not likely to make much of a difference in gaming ( if any ). Unless that machine is a server that has many high bandwidth connections, or the person gaming is moving files around from one machine to another while gaming (not very likely if they're pro gamers). I remember reading the original cards review, and claims from people saying something like how it improved their gaming experience immensely. I also remember wondering how full of **** these people were, or how much they were getting paid to make such claims. You're never going to see a difference that big, when you're pinging sub 1ms on a local connection, or much more than 10ms to a connection thats a state or two away. Even if there was, that difference will never be noticeable( assuming you're not dropping packets left and right, in which case you've got bigger problems ).People who game from home will see very little if any difference as their DSL, or cable service is much, much slower. Even if there was a difference, that difference would not be perceivable.
yyrkoon - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
Derek, all of Intel pro series cards should have ToE(TCP/IP offload Engine). Microsoft even supports a lot of these cards with special code for server applications. That is, I mean in their Server OSes. The Pro cards also have Link Aggregation, Fail Over, and high availability capabilities through software downloads from Intel.Now, I forget which model, but there is model from Intel that is basically two cards in one(two ports) that costs just as much as the Killer NiC here . . . and way out classes it minus the (oh joy) sound processing.
Anyways, I would expect a person doing a review on a NiC to know all of this already . . .
Qi - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Product page:http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/adapters/gig...">http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/a...ers/giga...
Product brief PDF:
http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/prodbrief/319831.p...">http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/prodbrief/319831.p...
And it's also somewhat aimed at gamers:
The Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter allows you to take advantage of this dedicated I/O by combining Gigabit Ethernet with PCI Express to provide high-performance network connectivity for desktops with PCI Express slots. Make the Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter your choice for applications utilizing rich media content such as video streaming, web applications, music, and gaming.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
Again, nothing about network stack offloading ... just checksums and something about interrupts.mindless1 - Saturday, July 4, 2009 - link
The faster the system a nic is placed in, the less significant network stack offloading should be. IMO the article has it backwards, those benefitting the most would not have a certain level of higher end system, but at the same time it has to be remembered that networking in general is not an especially high latency scenario on the client side relative to wan latency.Spoelie - Monday, July 6, 2009 - link
Actually the article has it right..While the impact of the killer NIC might be more significant on a old/slow entry system, spending that $120 on other parts will still net you way more performance.
A killer NIC can only help during heavy network traffic, while a faster CPU is useful in almost any situation. So recommending this NIC to a gamer as an upgrade over other parts of his system is not a good idea IMO, only when there's nothing else to upgrade does this card become an option.
@Derek:
Maybe some other interesting tidbit is the impact on power consumption, since this is essentially a pc on a chip..
Qi - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
The Intel Gigabit CT is a desktop NIC that offloads some of the work to my knowledge. This is on the Intel page:'Delivers increased performance while significantly reducing CPU usage'
And in the product brief PDF we can read this:
TCP checksum offload – transition control protocol (TCP), user diagram protocol (UDP), Internet protocol (IP)
DerekWilson - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
This card does not offload the networks stack ...It looks like at most it offloads checksum generation / verification (though it is unspecific) and implements interrupts for some thing (though, again, it isn't very specific).
That card doesn't do nearly as much as the Killer from what I can see...
But, as per our article, anything as good or better than an on-board NIC is going to work just fine.
lyeoh - Monday, July 6, 2009 - link
You said:"That card doesn't do nearly as much as the Killer from what I can see..."
And:
"and with no significant difference between the baseline option and the Killer NIC, certainly no other add-in board is going to be worse ... and they aren't capable of being better. "
But you have provided NO PROOF that an add in card does worse or better.
We anandtech readers can make such claims as well. Forgive some of us for expecting Anandtech to do reasonably decent benchmarks - just like you do for other stuff.
If there's a very expensive video card that doesn't do much better than an integrated video, that does not automatically mean that a different add-in video card would do about the same.
At least with the SSD stuff Anandtech told the manufacturer "hey guys - this sucks", and the manufacturer eventually did something about it.
It would be good to find out which scenarios this card makes a diff compared to integrated NICs and other add in NICs (e.g. Intel, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvel). After all this card costs about 3 to 10 times the price!
GokieKS - Friday, July 3, 2009 - link
How many people do you know of that another add-in card NIC for their gaming system?For the vast majority, if not all, of the people who would consider buying this thing, the alternative is the integrated NIC on their motherboard.