2006 will forever be known as the year of gaming network performance. We have seen more gaming-related network advances announced this year than in any other. Many major communications companies have begun to recognize our massive market and are poising themselves to profit from us. Now, we are always looking to squeeze the most performance we can out of our connections. We are the gamers that don’t just play because the graphics are pretty; we are out for blood. We play to light up that scoreboard and become a local legend, even if just on one server. We asked for a price to be put on the head of our greatest enemy: Lag. Some of these companies have spent years in development trying to not only define that price, but to give us powerful weapons against it. Some of the powerful weapons that have been added to our available arsenal are software-based, such as PlayLinc, Xfire, and SteelSecurity, and others are based on hardware, such as the KillerNIC. These solutions range anywhere from free to almost $300. This is a considerable amount of money being spent to only eliminate one particular bottleneck; however, these companies realize how this can detrimentally affect gameplay, and how we will pay well to simply reduce it.

Today’s definition of Lag is a culmination of negative effects which occur while in game. Lag is defined as anything that creates a stuttering or skip in our framerates - this could be anything, from an excess of graphical processing and CPU limitations to network latency and the fact you are still playing on your grandma’s dialup. Products like SteelSecurity look to reduce lag by optimizing, cleaning, and implementing preventative measures on your PC. Products like the KillerNIC attempt to reduce lag by offloading the network computations to an entirely separate processor on the NIC. While these solutions will help -- and probably gain you a few extra frames and a lower ping -- there is quite a bit of money required for this relatively small gain.

So here we are in the middle of Q3 2006, and the announcements haven’t stopped. However, today I bring you something that is beyond what anyone else has ever attempted -- something that is proven solid, and on a massive scale in comparison to all other product announcements this year. Imagine a world where you could live in New York, connect to a server in California, and have a ping as low as 30-35ms. Imagine a private network, implemented nationwide, for gaming traffic only, where the normal congestion of the internet does not even come into play. Imagine no longer, because it has arrived.

Presenting GameRail, the nationwide private network for gaming traffic only.

As with all ideas, GameRail started as a mere spark. This spark happened to be in the mind of Darrell Gentry. Mr. Gentry is a long-time gamer and network industry veteran. From being the first Chief Technical Officer of BroadSpan and a Computerworld Smithsonian Award Finalist, to co-founding a wireless broadband network to serve rural Missouri and being involved in server acceleration research at Washington University; Darrell has spent his life trying to improve the internet. More specifically, he has been hunting. He has been hunting down the universal enemy of all gamers: Latency.

I had the chance to get on the phone with Darrell and discuss this revolutionary idea. It’s a good thing he agreed, because I had some very sincere doubts about GameRail’s whole concept. My doubts were probably very similar to the ones you have as you read this article. Is it all a bunch of hype? How in the hell will they create a private network for gamers? Is this an ISP I will have to get a link to at my house? If you use existing lines, won’t you still have the same problem? However, after this hour-long conversation, I have to say that I am a believer -- and I want to show you what I believe is one of the coolest advances to come along in the world of gaming.