We've previously discussed how a company by the name of Bigfoot Networks has begun marketing a "Network Gaming Accelerator card" they promised would lower your latency and "kill lag." To sell gamers and investors on the idea, a few years back they released an amusing (but since pulled) pseudo-scientific whitepaper that redefined "lag" (or latency) as we traditionally know it - largely denying the reality that most causes of lag are outside the player's control (bad lines, saturated nodes, or other problems).

Their first generation uber-NIC offloaded all networking chores from the CPU to the card's 400Mhz processor and 64MB of RAM, resulting in some slight latency and frame-rate improvements over traditional gear. The company says they've now got a second generation version of the card named the "Killer Xeno," which comes with more memory, an upgraded network processing unit (NPU), and integrated audio for hardware-accelerated voice-chat.Of course unless your ISP just stinks, or the coaxial drop to your apartment building needs to be replaced. While the usual startup promoting sites un-skeptically paint this product as something revolutionary, you'd probably be better off saving your money (two versions of the cards go on sale in April from $129.99 & $179.99).