Graphics Card with Network Adapter, Odd Marriage or Awesome Gaming Tool?

Bigfoot Networks has announced that it has been working with ATI to offer a graphics card (Radeon HD 5770 pictured here) that comes with a smart Ethernet adapter to make a “best of breed” (their words) combo for gaming. It’s true that when it comes to gaming, Network performance can be as important as graphics performance, that’s why Bigfoot has been working on its Game Networking DNA technology that helps prioritize game network packets be recognizing packets from popular games. It also bypasses the Windows network stack in a bid to offer the highest performance, often measure not only in bandwidth, but also latency.

Previous Bigfoot products are said to improve performance noticeably, but we have not tried it. In my opinion, this is for very hardcore gamers. No word on the pricing yet, but the Bigfoot 2100 stand-alone Gaming Network Adapter costs around $130.