The prime thing is being DMA master capable, and having drivers for enough OS to support it, as opposed to having to use generic compatibility drivers. Back in the day, there were some with small buffers, but I think they just caused latency rather than cured much.

Well I have this Intel 10/100 Mbps card equiped with an i960 and some RAM on it. Not sure if Win9x is supported though.

I should conduct some tests along with Realteks and 3Coms...

Were those the ones that ran Linux on an embedded CPU? I recall they were overhyped, and only made a significant difference on low-spec systems. Which was kind of silly, because owners of budget systems weren't exactly the kind of people who were going to pony-up several hundred dollars on a NIC. 😄

How much did the card sell for? They are extremely scarce in my country.

The principle was a little more sensible when CPUs were single-threaded, but by the time the Killer NIC came out it was widely accepted that it gave zero tangible performance benefits.

However, the reason I think it’s a shame they died out is that each one had a 400MHz PowerPC processor and 128MB of memory.

Bigfoot provided a SDK with the cards, and it was possible to write apps to run on them that operated truly independently of the rest of the PC, named FNApps.

For example they wrote a BitTorrent client that could manage and store your torrents without using any resources on the host PC.

As far as I’ve seen nobody else ever wrote any apps for it, but Amiga dudes do use them as makeshift accelerators by messing with the firmware.

HwAoRrDk wrote on 2026-09-25, 08:55:

Were those the ones that ran Linux on an embedded CPU? I recall they were overhyped, and only made a significant difference on low-spec systems. Which was kind of silly, because owners of budget systems weren't exactly the kind of people who were going to pony-up several hundred dollars on a NIC. 😄

I guess there's a relationship to WinModems vs modems (dialup) and TNCs vs simple modems (ham radio).
A dedicated computer (such as an intelligent network card) might be less flexible/powerful than a software-solution but same time has one big advantage:
It's not reliant on the stability of the host OSes' multi-tasking capabilities.
Something like a hardware-based 56k modem, a TNC or an intelligent NIC doesn't drop the connection if the host has 100% usage or freezes for a moment.

Agree with BitWrangler - Good DMA is critical for "fast"!

Pretty much any network card I've used does DMA.

One of my oddball creations from the past is "DDLINK" a DOS file transfer over Network, COM or LPT.

Knowing what's involved in networking, and relying on a "packet driver" to access the network (which has Ks of code in it), and knowing that my LPT transfer code was very small/tight (couple dozen lines of .ASM) and that LPT moved 4 bits at a time "over the wire" not 1-bit at a time like serial or network - and being on a 10bps network at the time, At first I thought LPT would be noticeably faster!

I did some tests, and was pleasantly surprised to see that network is still MUCH faster than a tight .ASM loop moving 4 bits at a time. In that loop, the CPU still had to move and reassemble the individual nibbles, when the network card was DMAing directly to/from receive buffers, and CPU only had to deal with transferring those buffers to/from storage. (which it also had to do for LPT transfers) - The NIC is also performing CRC verification of the transferred data in hardware!

Re: DDLINK: Easily move files between/To/From DOS systems

Cyfrifiadur wrote on 2026-09-25, 10:11:

How much did the card sell for? They are extremely scarce in my country.

The one I spotted looks like it went for $40.00. I see another PCI version without the big K on it that went for $35.00.

lastmile wrote on 2026-09-25, 02:44:

Are there more common PCI or PCI-X network cards that work on Win 98 and do the same thing?

As far as I know, the later 3Com NICs supported hardware offloading for IP packet checksums, and the Intel PRO/100 and PRO/1000 did too.

Nowadays, even PCIe Realtek cards support this, starting from gigabit models. The 100 Mbps ones are completely software-driven.

If you're referring to traffic prioritization, all your 'tagged' traffic will end at your router or at your ISP's very first switch.
It's an absolutely useless feature for a home user.

AFAIK Win9x doesn't support any kind of offload. You need Win2K or newer. Though I don't know much about older NT networking.

I also think you can eek a bit more throughput out of some NICs if you can adjust their interrupt generation/moderation. You get more throughput with more CPU usage. I think I "discovered" this while trying to get more out of 98SE years ago. If you have 98SE running on a stupid fast CPU it's not an issue. Of course it's terribly inefficient and still not as fast as 2K.