A New Kind Of NIC

twolfe18

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Mar 16, 2006
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I was wondering, after reading about the new nforce 500 series chipsets, about their new technology FirstPacket.

From what i read, it sounds amazing, allowing you to play online games and download bittorrent at the same time (you can read more at http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/05/23/nvidia_nforce_5/3.html ). i was then wondering if this would be possible to put this technology in a NIC card that i could buy. i am not going to be upgrading my motherboard for quite a while, but i would certainly buy one of these in a second.

that said, do you think that nvidia, or anyone else for that matter, will sell a NIC card with packet prioritization technology in the near future?
 

Cabletwitch

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Feb 3, 2006
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Its an interesting concept certainly, but whether or not it actually works well in the real world is another matter. Packet prioritisation in the case of nVidia's technology also only works on outgoing packets, not incomming ones, so the speed improvement will most probably be minimal.

Of course, the easy option is to avoid heavy downloading when playing online games, unless you have large amounts of outgoing bandwidth (200k/s or higher).
 

VTOLfreak

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Jan 23, 2006
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LOL The gamers have discovered QoS...
Remember that "QoS packet scheduler" thing that you can install on your NIC in the Windows "Connections" screen?
Who wants to guess what you can do with that? :roll:

Now if game developers would actually get off their ass and use the Windows QoS API other companies wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel.
 

Cabletwitch

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Yeah, its essentially the same thing, only done in hardware, so the CPU doesnt have to get so involved. Its debatable as to wether or not it actually makes a difference, I usually dont find one.