TCP/IP Acceleration

General networking solutions leave the work of packet inspection to the system itself instead of doing it at location on the network card using hardware. The CPU and memory need to do all the work of moving the data around from the MAC over the driver to the application and back. This uses a small amount of CPU cycles and fills memory, but if you think Gigabit this may become an important factor.



NVIDIA has decided to do most of the work at the local hardware level, which has the advantage that the CPU has these few extra cycles to do bigger and better things. The drawback here is that a software firewall becomes useless as the packets never move that far up into the software level to be inspected. While some routers have hardware firewalls, most do not. NVIDIA turns the TCP/IP Acceleration off by default. If you want to use it, you have to enable it in the Web-based NVIDIA Network Access Manager (NAM). Considering the amount of CPU usage saved cannot be that large, the tradeoff may be too big for most users who do not have another form of firewall protection.