Nvidia Cuts TCP Offloads To End Data Corruption

Since the nForce4's release, the chipset's ActiveArmor networking capabilities have struggled to live up to their promised potential for reducing CPU utilization by handling TCP checksumming in hardware rather than on the host CPU. Over time, we've watched ActiveArmor's CPU utilization oscillate between impressively low and alarmingly high. Every new driver release seemed to change ActiveArmor's CPU utilization, and to make matters worse, many found that using ActiveArmor at all could lead to data corruption or instability.

NVIDIA claims the latest ForceWare drivers—6.70 for the nForce4 for AMD and 6.85 for the nForce SLI X16—have resolved ActiveArmor's data corruption issues for good, but the fix comes at the expense of CPU utilization. NVIDIA has today confirmed to TechReport that it's been forced to scale back ActiveArmor's TCP offload engine in order to avoid data corruption.