I know there’s something I’m not getting… can someone explain?

The ping time of concern is that between your computer and the game server on which you are playing. Every little bit counts. Some people can tell the difference between 90 and 100 ms, others need more of a difference to tell.

The Killer NIC reduces ping times by a offloading packet construction and deconstruction to a dedicated processor solely for that purpose. No other software is running on that NPU (well, it’s a “full” Linux system in relative terms), so it can focus on accepting data from the host machine, packaging it, and sending it on its way. When data is received, it can get the data and pass it up to the operating system really quickly.

That’s one way the ping time is reduced. The second is really a side effect of the above. All that work needed to construct/deconstruct the packet would normally be done by the CPU. The CPU has better things to do, such as calculating the physics of things in the next frame or handing an AI decision. Since it doesn’t have to handle packet transfer, you see a lower ping because your system is more responsive. Additionally, your framerate is higher because the CPU doesn’t have to spend time waiting for packet stuff to happen.

It’s not unlike how a GPU improves performance by offloading graphics calculations to a dedicated processor.