Recommendation required for NIC card

I'm not sure you _can_ get deterministic communication with Ethernet, much less with TCP/IP, much less under WinDoze or Eunuchs. It's a shared medium, hence you will have collisions, and backoffs (and/or store/forward in switches) will happen.

There are some audio-over-ethernet products that claim some kind of phase-match, but I'm nearly certain they are not TCP/IP-based.

Well, a two station full duplex link should not have any collisions or store/forward switch problems. Does that count?

-- glen

Yeah, but the OP wanted WinDoze, and I'm not convinced that real-time programming can be done in WinDoze...

Of course, it probably depends on what the OP meant by deterministic, but that's a rathole.

For a realtime system that can be _way_ too late.

You understand that "realtime" does not mean "fast", it means "on time and on schedule".

The real time audio transmission (and other real-time communications though Ethernet) systems typically use UDP (standard part of TCP/IP protocol stack) or raw ethernet packets.

With the TCP protocol it is hard to guarantee real-time performance, because of retransmission and automatic network speed adaptation that TCP does...

With UDP or raw ethernet, the packet gets quicly to the network and to the receiver... it either get there or does not get there quicly. No unknown delays on the way... Put time stamp / serial number to the packet, so you will know if packets return at out of order or too late (discard too late packets).

I don't know about windows, but I used to run a group of diskless Suns. Once we had to shut down the server for a few days. The clients nicely wait days for their server to come back.

-- glen