Yep, and because crc calculations, buffer splitting etc. are now done by cpu, it should be actually faster when it goes through NIC. (depending on driver performance & hardware acceleration capabilities of the card)
My integrated NIC (Intel PRO/1000 CT) seems to have following hardware capabilities:
- QOS managment
- Hardware flow control
- Up to 1024 receive buffers
- Up to 1024 send buffers
- TCP checksum (receive & send)
- IP checksum (receive & send)
- And some more.. (stupid thing shows them in finnish
)
Which means that use of TCP protocol shouldn't add any overhead to CPU, when compared to sending RAW packets.