Hey everyone, I am the inventor of the Killer NIC.

Thank you for the interest in our Killer Network Card, the interest has been amazing!
This will be my only post in this thread, as I don't want to hijack it!

I hope that some of your questions are answered in this FAQ I put together: http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/FrequentlyAskedQuestions.aspx .
If there are still questions, I would love to try to answer them at our sponsored community site: http://www.endlagnow.org/ELNForums/

Thanks, Tytus

Here's to hoping TR gets one for review...

WTB ambulance:

Had an accident involving large amounts of laughing and a cracked rib.

Can I sue Bigfoot for making me laugh too hard?

Bigfoot Networks has since raised over $4 Million and won numerous awards for its business plan, including a $100,000 top prize in the University of Texas MOOT Corp. competition.
Yup, sounds pretty moot.

Did anyone else see the flash "Tea bag" ad for the card? How silly. Buy this and cement yourself in the consumer hall of shame forever, dork.

It can run "FNapps"? We need a FN killer app now lol

I like how it's PCI. What is it with companies releasing these "gaming cards" on PCI when "gaming" motherboards are deceasing the amount of PCI slots? I mean, if you have this card (PCI), the Aegia card (PCI) and a x-fi (PCI), you're not gonna have enough slots. It would be a much better idea, I think, to make some of these PCIe-1x. But of course, that would make sense. And these cards are clearly designed for people who don't have any sense.

The Killer NIC will launch with a $279.99 price tag

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HAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAHHAHAA!!

Ok ok, I'm ok...ut oh....
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Everyone suspects that this is snake-oil, and they are right.

There are two problems with networks: the volume of traffic, and the delay.

Network accelerators, like this, are often made for high-performance computers that need to handle 1-gbps worth of traffic. Since games use less than 1-mbps (a typical speed for a DSL or cable modem), there is no problem with computers handling the volume of gaming traffic.

The typical delay for a computer's TCP/IP stack is less than 100-microseconds, but online games typically have 100-millisecond latency/ping.

Either way you look at it, if Bigfoot could make it's part of the network stack "infinitely" fast, then it would improve game performance only by 0.1%.

There is more to the story. Almost all network cards already have TCP/IP checksum offload, for example. Your network card almost certainly has most of the features they advertise.

By the way, nVidia's network adapter with it's "hardware firewall" is also snake oil.

If you want to reduce the delay/latency/ping for online games, the #1 most important item to look at is your cable-modem or DSL modem, and/or any home routers in between. These often add 1-millisecond to 10-millisecond latency to your games. If your ping is 100-millisecond latency already, replacing your 10-millisecond router could make a 10% difference in network latency. That's a hundred times better than the 0.1% improvement that the bigfoot card might deliver, but at smaller price.

This is a freaking LAN server product marketed as a "gaming" card. I am pretty sure that some of the really nice, but expensive iSCSI, two-quad Gigabit ethernet and 10gigabat ethernet PCI-X/PCIe 4x+ cards have this card's features.

Again, latency is a factor of how far the packets have to go from your system to the server and vice versa. The only way to mininze it is by having an ISP with the most direct path to the server in question and play a server that is relatively close to your location.

After reading the interview it sounds like they're not banking on the technical merits of their card to sell it. The guy kept on about winning and being the best. You can't win or be the best without our card!

I'll go out on a limb and say they'll be gone by this time next year. And if there is any technical merit to what they are trying to sell it could be bought by someone else and possibly used in someone's future products.

This thing is obviously 99% hype and marketing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I'm very interested in the Linux on this card. A 0.00% (rounded up) performance increase from UDP isn't much. However, taking bittorrent, fire-wall app, and voice chat out of local memory, and away from the CPU, would be interesting, although not worth $290. I hope that these people go bankrupt, and fast. That way, nVidia could buy them for a song and we could see their Linux distro inside a chipset, where it could actually reach a gamer.

Raw acceleration aside, the Killer NIC also includes an embedded Linux distribution that can run "FNapps." These FNapps can be "anything from simple packet monitoring utilities [like fire-walls, etc] to full-blown VOIP programs or file-sharing systems: even mini-game servers/chat servers," and they can use the Killer NIC's built-in USB port to store data in USB keychain drives or to interface with USB headsets.

I wonder if it would be possible to fashion a security exploit for this, so that a hacker could remotely inject their own malicious FNapp into the NIC to run. If this could be done, it's a disquieting thought.

Of course, the price point is ridiculous for what will probably amount to a small increase in gaming performance at best. Paying that much for a NIC is ridiculous, IMO, when I already have two gig nics on my system board. Gamers might be able to conceive paying $50, maybe even $99.95 for something this gimmicky-looking, but $279 won't fly.

Performance optimizations only really matter when they are made on a bottleneck in a critical path. I'm not convinced UDP handling in current client-side network cards is a significant contributor to lag in gaming. This thing could be 10,000 times the speed of the average NIC at handling UDP, and the difference might not amount to a millisecond. We'll have to review it and see.

Let's get this straight: a vast majority of gamers have a DSL/Cable line behind a router, right? The real key to making this kickass: optimizing udp gaming packets while this nic is setup as a router.

Even with that, there are numerous packet shaping techniques to get UDP higher priority, etc. Let's see some reviews on non LAN setups. I'd like the average joe to connect to some CS server, with a typical sub 30ms connect (I do it all the time) and then switch the card to this Killer NIC.

I dunno... this sounds like snake oil.

I don't think something like this will really help performance much, and at the price they're asking, the idea is even more questionable imho.

Even if it'll turn out to be working I don't know if anyone is going to get this. 270$ for NIC it's 240$ to much IMHO. Even though I'm never gonna get it I'm still eager to see some benchmarks :D

The Intel card can already push 100x more UDP data than my DSL line can handle, so what's the point? Latency is all that matters, and less crap between the CPU and the network is probably better. UDP checksums are trivial and do not load the CPU significantly at all.

The Killer NIC will launch with a $279.99 price tag

o_0 for a little better ping.... wow. on a lan.. maybe for 50-100$... but over the wwwibble... where its everone elses network that blows. not a chance.

and hell no for 280$... i'll buy a gigbit NAS and hack my own distro 1st.

wow

So will it improve preformance when I UT2004 and torrent at the same time? That price tag makes me want to go run out and buy a PPU...

so the question is, will you still blame your isp or this card when your still lagging...

Bringing the product to market without any reviews/previews having taken place just sets off alarm bells as far as I'm concerned :/

And that price is just ridiculous given that so many other factors can affect gaming performance online.

Company's really love to stick expensive items to people that don't know any better! This is probably the most ridiculous waste of money I have ever seen. Any person with a clue could show on a typical gaming rig, networking saps a tremendous 1-2% of your systems power. Those theoretical numbers - 71% increase in UDP calls - just means it CAN handle them, not that your game needs the extra capability. UDP has very little processing going on per packet anyway...it is essentially just a step up from a raw IP packet. Totally useless and insanely overpriced, even if it does give you .05% better performance. Can't wait to see it show up in those Dell/Alienware metal bricks.

It sounds like it might be good product but at that price I guess I will never know

Actually, given that it specifically enhances UDP packet handling, it would make a good card for a software-based video conferencing system. The vast majority of the data in video conferencing is UDP, with TCP generally reserved for call setup/management. Given the cost of some VC software solutions this NIC, should reality match the hype, would be a good deal.