eagl, quite frankly, those sites that came to the conclusion this card is doing something great made it easy for me to know which sites can be trusted and which ones cannot. I know too much about all this to by into the marketing of this product. And that is what this product is all about.
Well, if I was talking about "great" results, then you'd be right. But I"m not even though you insist that I am. I'm talking very specifically about actual in-use test results that say that the killer nic demonstrated reduced latency in specific situations however the benefits are not noticeable except for highly experienced twitch gamers.
Let me say that again. The killer nic demonstrated reduced latency in specific situations however the benefits are not noticeable except for highly experienced twitch gamers.
My input specifically where it applies to AH is that the only AH gamer who might have ANY benefit from a killer nic is someone who is hardcore into dueling. I have noted from experience in AH (including those dueling tournys) that an AH player with reduced latency can have a demonstrable advantage over his opponent. In that situation, someone with a few hundred bucks to waste might find some benefit from one of these things.
That's it. No claims of greatness, no blathering of obscure technical terms that mean nothing in terms of real performance. Only the observation that the killer nic demonstrated in actual use a slight decrease in latency, and that the only people who might benefit from that are (as noted in the article I read) highly experienced twitch gamers, and (my input) AH duelers with too much money on their hands.
Some of the early marketing of this product actually claimed it could change the routes of the network connection to find better ones. That was just a flat out lie.
Who gives a flying ****? I didn't mention this, neither did anyone else in this thread. It was about what a killer nic would do in AH and routing was not brought up. Sheesh
Sorry, but this is smoke and mirrors at its finest.
This is true unless you play twitch games for a living or are obsessed with dueling in AH, in which case I could see someone wasting a few hundred bucks on one in order to gain that microsecond advantage that can turn an HO shot into a killing front quarter shot. Been there, done that, drex schooled my butt a bazillion times as I learned it.
Sure there are cheap NIC's out there, but no one has to spend over $30 to get a really good network card that will offload the CPU of the entire network stack, handle all data transfers, and include jumbo frame buffer support.
"Good enough" is good enough for pretty much everyone. We are in complete agreement on that. Our difference of opinion is if there is ANY measurable benefit from using the killer nic. I argue that there is a measurable difference but it is so small that almost nobody would ever notice it even in controlled circumstances, and I have not and will not bring up the outlandish and false claims made by the killer nic promoters or it's fanbois.
As for me, I know that there are also distinct advantages to having a POOR network connection and if you know how to utilize certain aspects of the smoothing code, you can take advantage of it. I just won't show anyone else how to do it since I'm not going to help others game the system
