NVIDIA FirstPacket Technology

[ctrob]

What exactly does this apply to?

It's been touted for improving broadband gaming performance but I'd have thought it would only apply to packets transmitted through the chipset.

Does this mean it will only help if you connect via the built-in gigabit ethernet?

I can't see how it could do anything more than could be done in s/w if you were, eg, connecting via wireless LAN or USB.

 

[ctrob]

I'm not sure I understand.

Given the packet rate for broadband gaming, software QoS would have a negligible effect on overal system performance and could be far more sophisticated than the hardware solution implemented by NVIDIA. So efficiency shouldn't be an issue.

Their FP techonology still only makes sense to me if it applies to the gigabit interface built in to the chipset.

I'm not sure what 'host' RAID is. I understand that s/w raid would be implemented above the (device) drivers, and that a pure h/w RAID solution would look like a regular hardrive, with the RAID being implemented 'behind the scenes'.

Does 'host' RAID refer to RAID that is implemented on an interface card, and hence requires BIOS and/or driver support, but not (eg) multiple transfers and s/w implementation of RAID.

Thanks.

 

[linux_0]

Hardware QoS is almost always better than software QoS because it has a much lower letency and is a lot more consistent and predictable.


If I'm not mistaken, there's pure software RAID, pure hardware RAID and somewhere-in-the-middle / hybrid RAID.

 

[ctrob]

True in principle, but realistically the QoS has to be applied at the bottleneck.

There's no point in having hardware QoS on the gigabit Ethernet if your broadband is connected via wireless or USB...

Likewise, even if you are connecting to your broadband router via the gigagbit then you probably still won't get QoS, as this normally requires a queue to operate and gigabit is so fast that this won't happen.

The place to do it would be in the broadband router.

There is another technique I know of, which may be patented, that is to break up big packets (eg for ftp or http) into small packets so that traffic that needs low latency (eg voice/gaming) can be interspersed for lower latency (at the expense of overall throughput). But I doubt it's that sophisticated and you wouldn't be doing that sort of thing if you wanted to be king 'of ping' anyway.

 

[emogoch]

While you're right that FP QoS wouldn't really have much affect on your internet traffic consider what happens if your computer is in a LAN. Imagien you're playing a game of counter-strike when, all of a sudden, your brother starts to grab that movie that you downloaded last week from your computer, and your mother decides to turn on some music, streaming your iTunes library to the HTPC in the living-room. On top of all this, your security crazed father just found a new network security tool and has started pinging all the computers on the network with it, reading info, etc. Oh, and all this is on a 10/100 network, so the fact that your controller can handle Gigabit connections is meaningless.

Yes it may be a contrived example, but these types of scenarios are possible. A LAN party with a combination of file sharing & gaming (which I used to host with my friends) is also one where QoS would have been a great benefit.

 

[linux_0]

True in principle, but realistically the QoS has to be applied at the bottleneck.

There's no point in having hardware QoS on the gigabit Ethernet if your broadband is connected via wireless or USB...

Likewise, even if you are connecting to your broadband router via the gigagbit then you probably still won't get QoS, as this normally requires a queue to operate and gigabit is so fast that this won't happen.

The place to do it would be in the broadband router.

There is another technique I know of, which may be patented, that is to break up big packets (eg for ftp or http) into small packets so that traffic that needs low latency (eg voice/gaming) can be interspersed for lower latency (at the expense of overall throughput). But I doubt it's that sophisticated and you wouldn't be doing that sort of thing if you wanted to be king 'of ping' anyway.

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/FoxconnC51XEM2AA/7.html

Your OS has it's own queue after all.

 

[ctrob]

I just mentioned this feature because I was wondering whether I could just discount it from the decision process. I'm not sure it's really helped.

Yes, it could be useful in a LAN type situation with filesharing. It might possibly be useful in a broadband situation, but I think a software solution would be better in that case (or better still, implemented in the router).

None of this (on your PC) helps where your brother is bit-torrenting next seasons BSG or WoW or whatever, on another PC sharing the same access router... For that it has to be on the router.

I do know about queues in the OS - but I think they're mostly in the devices drivers, where nForce shouldn't have any influence. I've found some other block diagrams and flow charts but they're high level and inconclusive. I am an embedded software engineer so if I knew the design details I could tell exactly what it would enhance!