Anyone remember a post I made a couple of months ago where I showed a new network card with memory and cpu on? We all laughed about it - but here is a review by IGN which actually gives suprising results:
http://gear.ign.com/articles/729/729557p1.html
/Ankh
Killer NIC
Just reminds me why I never bother reading IGN, the review has almost as much BS in it as the original claims by the manufacturer.
The overhead for building and sending UDP/TCP packets is outright negligible, particularly when stood up against graphics processing, physics processing, audio processing. Encrypting a datastream for security and building application level packets takes a more noticeable amount of processor time but as the card doesn't expose an API built specifically for offloading this onto the NIC's processor then this still has to be done by the CPU. The claims they're making simply aren't realistic with the hardware they're providing.
The reason graphics cards and physics cards work is because they do expose their API's so that games can specifically make use of the hardware processors on those boards and some games are written to take advantage of this, however I've checked again and there is absolutely no support for a) This card in any of the games they claim it makes an improvement in and b) I can find no API specifications on their site which suggests is as I said - it simply doesn't expose an API for offloading any processing onto the NIC. Therefore, the only processing that can be offloaded, at driver level is the building of TCP/UDP packets - again something that is outright negligible in terms of processor cycles nowadays and for many years gone by. If an old 486 firewall can happily parse through a constant 100mbps network card's worth of data without a single dropped packet or a measureable increase in latency then a modern day computer sure as hell isn't going to struggle.
Even in the best case where an API were to be exposed and networking related calculations are offloaded to the NIC's processor the claims of drops of 15ms latency are still impossible, unless the original card being benchmarked again had some issue - a normal card, working correctly will not cause this kind of discrepancy, latency of those proportion simply isn't cause by your hardware but by the route your data has to take to reach it's destination. Also, a quick calculation about the FPS change they claim is that networking in their test is taking up 14% of the game's overall CPU time, again that's unrealistic in a modern well designed game engine, networking is more likely to take less than 1% and should never really take less than 5% unless your game is doing something unique with networking such as handling a truly networked advanced physics solution but afaik there isn't a game out there that does this yet, all games to date use approximations for things like handling ragdoll over networks. The GPU offloads most graphics stuff nowadays and physics cards will offload most physics stuff, again leaving the CPU more free than ever to handle things like game logic, audio and such.
Personally, I'm still laughing about it
What I would like to see however is an AI card, AI is one major area that could really do with some dedicated hardware to improve FPS dramatically rather than snake oil like this NIC.
The overhead for building and sending UDP/TCP packets is outright negligible, particularly when stood up against graphics processing, physics processing, audio processing. Encrypting a datastream for security and building application level packets takes a more noticeable amount of processor time but as the card doesn't expose an API built specifically for offloading this onto the NIC's processor then this still has to be done by the CPU. The claims they're making simply aren't realistic with the hardware they're providing.
The reason graphics cards and physics cards work is because they do expose their API's so that games can specifically make use of the hardware processors on those boards and some games are written to take advantage of this, however I've checked again and there is absolutely no support for a) This card in any of the games they claim it makes an improvement in and b) I can find no API specifications on their site which suggests is as I said - it simply doesn't expose an API for offloading any processing onto the NIC. Therefore, the only processing that can be offloaded, at driver level is the building of TCP/UDP packets - again something that is outright negligible in terms of processor cycles nowadays and for many years gone by. If an old 486 firewall can happily parse through a constant 100mbps network card's worth of data without a single dropped packet or a measureable increase in latency then a modern day computer sure as hell isn't going to struggle.
Even in the best case where an API were to be exposed and networking related calculations are offloaded to the NIC's processor the claims of drops of 15ms latency are still impossible, unless the original card being benchmarked again had some issue - a normal card, working correctly will not cause this kind of discrepancy, latency of those proportion simply isn't cause by your hardware but by the route your data has to take to reach it's destination. Also, a quick calculation about the FPS change they claim is that networking in their test is taking up 14% of the game's overall CPU time, again that's unrealistic in a modern well designed game engine, networking is more likely to take less than 1% and should never really take less than 5% unless your game is doing something unique with networking such as handling a truly networked advanced physics solution but afaik there isn't a game out there that does this yet, all games to date use approximations for things like handling ragdoll over networks. The GPU offloads most graphics stuff nowadays and physics cards will offload most physics stuff, again leaving the CPU more free than ever to handle things like game logic, audio and such.
Personally, I'm still laughing about it
What I would like to see however is an AI card, AI is one major area that could really do with some dedicated hardware to improve FPS dramatically rather than snake oil like this NIC.OFFICER XEST - PROTECTING YOU AGAINST FORUM CRIME
Che Xefan, el presidente.
Che Xefan, el presidente.
Hmm, speaking of AI cards:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... 06/1749252
I should go into the hardware prediction business
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... 06/1749252
I should go into the hardware prediction business
OFFICER XEST - PROTECTING YOU AGAINST FORUM CRIME
Che Xefan, el presidente.
Che Xefan, el presidente.