There's only one possible way they can do this - but they'll have to correct their advertising to be more specific.

Right now there's a wonderful program called cFosSpeed which allows for traffic shaping. Meaning, you can have your FTP server running, and/or a P2P app, without enforcing any limitations on bandwidth, and still have green ping bars in World of Warcraft and browse the Internet without lag in page loading.

Thats because it tags with FTP/P2P packets with low priority, and game/http packets with high priority, amongst other enhancements, like tagging ACK packets with higher priority than the rest of the traffic.

Programs like this have a big future, but cFosSpeed eats up some CPU time. Its not the most optimized program I've seen, it uses at least two different processes.

So, if someone managed to create a network card which can hardware-assist with traffic shaping (but still be configured through software), it could indeed have a niche in the market, and deliver on its promise on maximizing pings... at least, maximing pings in situations where your computer is doing more than just running your favorite game.

Reading the Shacknews post and whatever I could quickly google, I'm under the impression that they were just doing stack offloading. Shiho's got a good point about traffic shaping but I don't see much improvement to be gained from traffic shaping by itself. Although offloading + traffic shaping might give gains greater than the sum of it's parts. His background seems like he knows network stacks in and out so some way of forcing statefulness on UDP packets perhaps?

It's plausible but improbable what they propose to achieve unless we find out more what exactly they're doing, IMO.

Actually the Game Fuel for Dlink DGL-4300 does that traffic shaping and prioritization already.

I also have the Hawking Technology's Broadband Booster, it works well, esp if you are using P2P software while gaming. It is very easy to setup and can be used for consoles or other platforms.

Yep, that's it. Checksum calculations and all that in most consumer grade network cards end up at the processor. Higher end cards already have TCP offloading at the very least.

Also, I don't play games and have network intensive processes running the background and I'm guessing that that is the case with most people, too. Maybe elsewhere on the home network but not the system I'm playing at. In that scenario, traffic shaping won't really do much for me if done by the network card. Traffic shaping on the router would make more sense as I believe is the case with that Hawking product. Of course, my designated gaming system isn't really much of a power system so I might well be wrong in some of my assumptions.

This reminds me of a guy who posted a similar idea on MUD-Dev several months ago. He fought tooth and nail with industry veterans for the idea that offloading networking operations to hardware would combat lag. Got slapped down repeatedly then dropped off the discussion with a huff.
The thing is that for consumer-grade use (particularly games) there is no need for any sort of hardware involvement. Policing/Shaping, for instance, can be cheaply done by the kernel, and things like ingress queueing and CRC are already cheaply done by commodity hardware today. And the amount of net traffic that net games use is miniscule. So a hardware "solution" would solve nothing, particularly lag.
I vote "vapour" on this one.

Additional information about this can be found here.

It also heals with the power of magnets!

Quick question - isn't this the type of thing that XBox live users use to screw with people?

Anyway, still sounds like hooey.

But the bottleneck is almost always at the pipe, not the machine, no? Even if Windows wastes 60% of my Gigabit Ethernet port, that doesn't matter, since my 'net connection is a 512Kb downstream DSL. I mean, Windows could waste 99.9%, and I still wouldn't be able to notice...

I'm convinced for most people the pipes are the limiting factor, and not the machines. Then the only thing this accelerator can do is throttle traffic from non-essential network services, like what shihonage mentioned. But aren't there throttling routers on the market already?