Investor Money Goes To Magic Lag Reducing Tech

Gamasutra reports on Texas technology company Bigfoot networks, which just received a $4 Million investment to develop a lag-reducing hardware PC card. From the piece: "According to the firm, it will bring to market the world's first Gaming Network Accelerator card, which will allow online gamers to play their favorite games with less lag. The company explained: 'Lag is the number one problem in online video games today, and Bigfoot Networks is the only company in the world whose sole mission is to fight lag', but gave no specific technical explanation about how it intends to do this." Greg Costikyan spells it out on the Games*Design*Art*Culture blog: "So yes, there might be a business here. But if so, it will be a business built largely on bullshit."

Weakest link?

[LehiNephi]

I think it's obvious to all of us that the NIC is certainly not the weakest link in a connection. I know there has been some effort to produce NICs that handle the TCP/IP stack onboard, thus reducing the load on the CPU, but the potential difference between NICs is on the order of microseconds, if not less!

For those of you looking for quite entertaining reviews of products that are quite obviously scams like this, I highly recommend articles like this one [dansdata.com] on Dan's Data [dansdata.com]

Lag attack

[dada21]

Proper optimization of how data is transported in both directions is very important. Analyzing the connection as well as the route to the destination can probably be performed by software or hardware. Once the connection is analyzed, I'm sure there are real time changes that can be performed to better decrease latency and overall lag.

The question is why perform it in hardware rather than software?

Re:Lag attack

[AKAImBatman]

The question is why perform it in hardware rather than software?

Playing devil's advocate for a minute, during video games the CPU is usually otherwise occupied by tasks associated with feeding the GPU and processing AI/Physics. Separating this into a hardware card could provide an explicit processing environment to do such an analysis in real-time without stealing CPU time from the game. Plus, this would then be available to all programs/games running on the machine, not just those that support it. (Conceivably it could be done in a driver, though.)

That being said, my bull****-o-meter started spiking the moment I read the summary. There's not that much that can be done on the user's end. You may be able to guide a packet down faster pipes and switches, but more likely all the traffic between you and the destination has some saturation. (Seriously, what are those expensive switches and routers doing if they're not already trying to optimize traffic?)

Re:The "gold cables" of gaming?

[GigsVT]

Digital signals are a little more sensitive actually, but audio in general is extremely independant of wire characteristics.

Baseband audio is only 0-30khz and that's being generous. You can put 30khz across barbed wire fence and it'll sound the same. It's just too low frequency for RF effects to show up unless your wires are 50 miles long, no matter what any "audiophile" says.

Re:The "gold cables" of gaming?

[brunes69]

Digital signals are a little more sensitive actually, but audio in general is extremely independant of wire characteristics.

This is somehwat true, but there are two important factors here:

- In home audio at least, all the digital codecs ship with some levels of ECC. So any minor data lost is irrelevant.

- Because it is a digital signal and not analog, it is therefore either a perfect transmission, or a flawed transmission. There is no middle ground. If your reciever gets an uninturrupted data stream without obvious bleeps with your crappy 0.99 RCA SPDIF cable, then buying a $40 monster gold plated cable will make no difference whatsoever. If it did, then you would be hearing the interference as very obvious bleeps and bops, or your reciever would be cutting in and out. Digital audio codecs do not gracefully degrade as bits randomly vanish.

Re:So...what causes lag?

[theJML]

And that's why you shut down your AV when your playing... and chat, and those cd's your burning and those torrents you're pulling from and that pr0n playing on the second screen of your dual monitor setup. Concentrate on the game and all is well. I don't need someone's expensive add-in card to tell me that.

Now, perhaps we can invent an add-in card that uses subspace carrier waves that will make a direct connection to your opponent instead of wi-fi or copper wires that go through switches and proxies. (oh yeah, and they need to have open source linux drivers, :)

Re:Sure, why not

[ZombieWomble]

After all, there's a sucker born every minute.

And there's a business graduate who wants to take advantage of them. From TFA:

The company is a start-up company with roots from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and was formed by a team of Executive MBA students to improve the performance of online video games.

Personally, I would've expected a tech start-up to include at least someone with a degree in, you know, technology of some sort...

Don't they remember the 12 netwriking truths?

[BertieBaggio]

RFC 1925 should be required reading for everyone who thinks they have a bright new idea for a network. In this case the company should pay particular attention to rule number two:

[2] No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can't increase the speed of light.

Since the signal has to travel a certain physical distance, there will always be unavoidable lag. Changing the NIC will have little to no effect, unless you are using some antiquated card that was designed around the early TCP/IP stacks. And gamers are hardly known for not having hardware that is so cutting edge the wounds are still bleeding.

I'm waiting until some new VC-funded company requests major sums of money to build a NIC that communicates on the basis of quantum enatnglement for zero lag. Not to buy one, you understand, since you can't send information faster than the speed of light -- not even by entanglement.

And have a read of the RFC I mentioned [faqs.org] as well. Well worth the time.

Maybe not entirely BS

[xenocide2]

This article [cnn.com] gives a few scant details at the bottom about how it's accomplished. Apparently they plan to "offload" part of the work the server does over the internet to your computer's anti-lag card. Might be useful in a MMO where "server lag" does happen. On the other hand, you might as well just buy one of these damn cards for the server and be done with it.

So this might work to improve things, but it seems that your software would have to be rewritten to use it. And I don't know mow significant it is, but one of the guys behind it is a former Intel chip designer. I guess there's plenty of stupid shitty intel chips in the world, but even they didn't want a piece of this.

Re:Is it something like PowerPlay?

[Have Blue]

PowerPlay wasn't so much "fake" as "yet another futile attempt to introduce Internet-wide QOS".