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Networking - SLI for NICs :)
Dude it's all about gaming
A couple of other rather interesting features need to be found in the networking solution as there are three things rather noteworthy. First up this, remember that I told you that the platform will have two 1Gbit/s NICs ? NVIDIA calls this DualNet. You can now also bridge the two together NVIDIA calls this Teaming. So basically both NICs will work as one 2 GBit/s controller .. and it actually works pretty darn good. You simply hook up both connections to a switch and in the CP (Control panel) enable Network Teaming which binds the two NIC's as one.
At an NVIDIA presentation this was demonstrated. The main and thus "teamed" PC was functioning as a server and from 6 other clients massive amounts of data where send bi-directional. Very impressive as the network speed indeed neared 2GBit/sec. Teaming also provides network redundancy through fail-over capability. By hooking up Ethernet connections to both gigabit ports, not only is performance increased by combining the two pipes, but the network is immediately sheltered against a port or cable malfunction (such as a network wire getting kicked loose.)
Okay I tried .. but stressing 1 GBps is a really daunting task to do man !
The second new thing I just have to mention has to be the TCP/IP engine which now also runs over the nForce chipset and thus offloads your CPU. During massive amounts of data transport very little processor time is being utilized. Good stuff for sure, NVIDIA calls this TCP/IP Acceleration engine.
Above you can see an FTP session with TCP/IP acceleration enabled. It did not make much of a difference as all sessions utilized like 10% processor time. Then again, we where hardly stressing anything.
Another feature I would like to mention network wise is FirstPacket. A pretty cool feature, especially for gamers. When you are playing on-line / or in LAN or hey .. what about VOIP ? Don't you hate it that you for example can't have any other outbound traffic from for example an FTP or Bittorent client for all I care ? Doesn't your ping time go AWOL ? Yes, outbound traffic will kill off your ping times making it barely impossible to play on-line very well.
This is where NVIDIA FirstPacket comes in. At the NVIDIA control panel you can now prioritize your network traffic. So if you set a game like Serious Sam 2 with higher priority your ping times will remain fantastic as all other traffic will be lower in the data packet queue. Let me show you:
So I had to scale down the screenshots. But above you see Serious Sam 2 running in an window. it's in multiplayer mode over the internet connected to another server. Now to your lower right you see an active FTP session. With Firstpacket disabled our ping make the game practically unplayable with pings rising to 400-500 ms. With Firstpacket enabled as you can see that ping went down again. BTW it's still a little high ping but the server I was connected to was not rather close. Pretty impressive stuff as the options here are unlimited. Prioritize Voice over IP, or what about file-sharing clients during gameplay or whatever.
It's a really fun and handy feature that I highly appreciate.
