Back in January when most of the country was complaining of snow and I was sitting in my apartment in Phoenix complaining of needing to turn on my air conditioner (four computers makes a lot of heat!), Bigfoot Networks invited me to boot camp. Boot camps are fun. I’ve not attended many and most are about new games — GamersInfo isn’t known for its articles about tech. When a subject says, “Learning about lag and how to solve (some) of it,” or something to that effect my ears perk up — because everyone knows my e-mail talks to me. Off I went to Austin; then I spoke to them again at GDC. I’m still not the best tech person, but I get some of it now! Hopefully, I can impart that knowledge to you …

To date, most hardware has been focused on making graphics look better, making the computer run more efficiently or simply giving the user more space to store “stuff.” Network cards — the piece of equipment that determines how quickly information is passed between computers or (for the purposes of this article) between the player and the provider — haven’t been given much attention. Bigfoot Networks has been working on this problem for a few years.

Back in the Dark Ages of 2004, they launched a network card (or NIC) called the Killer NIC; its sole function was to improve the network performance for users who play games. This is an important distinction because if used for business, the improvements wouldn’t have been felt. This was a card for gamers who loved to play online.

This year, Bigfoot is bringing two new cards to the market with marked improvements. But they worried — and rightly so — that the average consumer wouldn’t be armed with the knowledge to determine if the card was something important enough to spend that cold hard cash on. I mean, if a $600 video card couldn’t improve the quality of the game, what could a network card do? That’s where the invitees to the boot camp come in.

Defining Lag
The Server
Thankfully, we started at the beginning. What is lag? The easy answer is: It’s that delay that kills me when I’m playing an FPS or MMOG. Well, yeah, but why? The answer to why is complicated but can be simplified to three basic problems: the server, the Internet and the client.

Many of the people reading this will be familiar (if not intimately so) with these terms and what they mean. How they contribute to lag may be a bit more nebulous. Let’s start with the server.

The server is the computer that hosts the game the consumer is playing. This could be World of Warcraft, Team Fortress 2 or a Starcraft server off in Korea. The location of the server doesn’t matter. What does matter is how the server is designed to handle the bazillion operations it must perform to make the game go.

Poor engineering can cause some truly horrendous lag. Then there is intentional server lag — the process by which a games company designs a game’s infrastructure to throttle the speed at which operations occur in the server; this can have the effect of reducing the speed at which users can enter a crowded server. Think of it as crowd control. Bigfoot hasn’t taken on the monumental task of (re)designing every game server on the planet. Only customers — known as players — can demand that. So, next?

The Internet (also known as the Network)
The list of factors that effect lag on the Internet makes my head swim. Here are a few:

• Packet Loss — data is compressed into “packets” and some simply get lost for reasons that follow
• Congestion — too much data passing through the switches that direct said data
• Faulty equipment — rather self-explanatory but when you consider competition (my rate is lower than yours!), you can see where maintenance might not occur as it should. Personally, I suffer from frayed lines from the junction that my ISP maintains to my apartment; apartment management is supposed to maintain this portion but …
• Looooong routes and bursty datagrams — I’m in New York City and I’m playing Starcraft in Korea. Duh! That other term is just a fancy way of saying the data packets, especially those used by voice, have a bad habit of starting and stopping — like traffic congestion.
• Client (player) bandwidth — I’m going to run 13 apps that require four times my allowed bandwidth! And so are four out of five of my neighbors!