Bigfoot Networks, which makes Killer NIC K1 network interface cards that can give gamers an unfair advantage in an online game by speeding animations as much as 30 frames a second, has signed a deal with Dell to provide the cards as an option on gaming desktop computers.
Gamers who buy the Dell XPS desktops can buy the cards for $149 extra and get much better performance in fast-action online games, said Mike Cubbage, general manager of consumer products. The cards will be available with the Dell XPS 630 and 730 systems, targeted at gamers.
“It works well with any game and gamers will notice it when the action is most intense,” he said.
Lag is gamer slang for when the result of an action appears later than expected, like when you shoot a weapon and nothing happens. Latency is the gap between when something is initiated and the effects are visible. Cubbage said the cards deliver a five millisecond to 20 millisecond improvement in latency in a game and that gamers should notice an improvement in the frame rate, or the speed of animation, of two frames to 30 frames per second. It all depends on how fast a gamer’s connection is.
But the technology has known value. It is similar to the “server offload engines,” or appliances that handle a piece of the processing load in a data center and thus offload it from the main servers, freeing them to do other tasks. Similarly, the Killer NIC K1 card offloads all networking tasks from the main processor. It has its own 333-megahertz network processor from Freescale, customized with Bigfoot’s own code.
There are other game routers in the market that try to do the same thing, such as the D-Link gaming router that uses a chip from Ubicom. The D-Link product is a router and so it can streamline the traffic across a network, while Bigfoot focuses on just one computer. In that way, they are complimentary products. Nvidia also has a chip set that helps speed up a network. But the Killer NIC K1 card has 64 megabytes of memory as well to speed up the system. It can handle not only network speed improvement but firewall security processing too.
The toughest competition will be ordinary network interface cards that cost $29 to $99. The K1 launched in February 2007, and game computer makers such as Alienware (now owned by Dell) have offered it as an option on computers but mostly it was sold as an aftermarket accessory.
Cubbage said his product is the only one that actually bypasses Windows’ network processing software, substituting its own that allows the processor to free up more system resources for other things. The card also prioritizes network packets based on what data has to be sent first.
The company was formed in 2004 and has 25 employees. It has raised $12.75 million in funding to date from Venio Capital Partners, Northbridge Partners and Palomar Venture Partners. (The first part of its series A was $4 million in 2005 and the second part was $8.75 million).