Day of Defeat: Source and FEAR
The frame rate on DoD: Source saw a modest 5% or so gain using the Killer NIC on Windows Vista.
Last time I reported the testing in Day of Defeat: Source I told you that even though the ping times didn’t show any difference between the Killer NIC and the on-board NIC, I could “feel” something different in the actual game play. The same still exists in our testing on Windows Vista, as again the ping rates look identical on both test systems.
Our testing in FEAR showed another modest FPS increase: 7.5% this time. BigFoot Networks is adamant that the FPS increase with FEAR on Vista is very often much more than this, up to 20% or more in some cases, but I didn’t see that in my tests.
Unlike in Windows XP, where we saw basically no ping improvements in FEAR, the Killer NIC K1 while running under Vista saw an average decrease of 10% in latency times. That’s a pretty interesting result and seems to fit with what BigFoot Networks was telling us about Vista’s networking stack.
