While the ZAM staff was at CES 2010, we had a chance to sit down with the executives from Bigfoot Networks and learn about all their plans going forward into 2010!

In many ways, the Consumer Electronics Show is like a circus. It has three main showcase areas, plenty of food and drink for everyone at the event and its fair share of bombastic individuals trying to draw the eye of the audience to their act. The atmosphere is almost electric, and not from the current running through the latest Samsung flatscreen TV.

So it was a relief when the ZAM staff met with Michael Howse and John Drewry, the CEO and VP of Marketing of Bigfoot Networks, in an area just off of CES’ North Hall. If you’re not familiar with Bigfoot Networks, you may at least be familiar with their flagship product, the Killer NIC, which unburdens your CPU from the effort of networking through the motherboard and instead pushes it all through the Killer NIC card. Think of it like onboard graphics versus an Nvidia or ATI card, you’d see a substantial difference almost immediately with the change.

According to Howse and Drewry, the same can be said about the Killer NIC and onboard networking. Last year, the company released the Killer Xeno Pro and their focus has been getting a much larger product penetration by working with partners like Dell and Alienware. “We’re shipping in around 30 gaming systems around the world,” Howse stated.

Since the release of the Xeno Pro, the pair of executives noted that two updates to the card have already been made available, making massive improvements to the card in its throughput and latency. Along with the two updates, the folks at Bigfoot also released the “Dashboard” tool, which is a free downloadable from the Bigfoot website that gives users all the statistics on their framerate, ping and more. This allows users to analyze their computer setup and “maximize their connectivity.”

 Many of the companies we talked to at CES were keen on the professional gaming scene, and Bigfoot was no exception. “We’re sponsoring four professional gaming teams, including Dignitas, SKGaming and Fnatic,” Howse said. “That’s been a big focus for us, because by winning the hearts and minds of professional gamers, you can begin to work with all of the gamers that are at that level.”

While it’s often necessary to talk about past achievements at CES, one of the major goals for most attendees is to find out what the future has in store for the companies they’re focused on. Bigfoot was no exception, and Howse noted that they have two major goals for this next year: product performance and usability.

It’s no surprise that product performance is one of Bigfoot’s key drives – almost every hardware company would point to this focus and strive toward it. “We want to continue to enhance our interface cards,” Howse said. “We want to have the fastest and the best network processor out there.”

Usability, on the other hand, is something that is a bit harder to grasp, as it could mean different things depending on the individual. In Bigfoot’s case, they want their card to truly be useful to their adopters. “We ask ourselves, how can we make our card more usable for our players?” Howse continued. “How can we provide the tools to make that happen?”

The usability focus may not have obvious ways of showcasing that goal, but Bigfoot continues to iterate on their Dashboard and make their card a part of the hardcore gamer’s repertoire. On the other hand, the performance push is very visible.

One of the best examples, shown in the video of EverQuest II above, is how inaccurate the content on the screen can be in an MMO when running standard network cards. While most games have lag and latency workarounds built into the code to help make for a smoother play experience, the Killer Xeno Pro can actually give players an accurate rendition of what’s occurring on the screen, which could be a critical factor in an endgame raid or a PvP arena match.

Along with that, both Howse and Drewry contend that adding a Killer Xeno Pro into a gaming rig has a much higher effect on increasing average framerates than the purchase of another GPU to run in SLI mode. According to an internal study done on Team Fortress 2, the average minimum framerate in an online deathmatch was increased by 17%... quite a substantial number.

That said, most gamers will need to do their own research to make sure the card is worth their $130 investment. But, if acceptance by pro gamers and top level hardware companies is any indication, the folks at Bigfoot Networks are definitely doing something right.