Does it improve on what a builtin intel nic does as far as latency, etc with packaged software?
WinOF driver enables and supports the ability to do Windows “kernel-bypass” to tcp/udp by using RDMA fast-connection , which is basically fast direct HW “cache-to-cache” connectivity.
Protocol such as SMBDirect in Windows provide significant high network-performance by using regular TCP/IP only with the RDMA-connection, bypassing the kernel-space and using proper Mellanox network adapters, that will actually provide a TCP/IP stack along with the new RDMA stack.
You can find plenty of articles on that subject in Mellanox community publications in the web
Here is one of them:
“How To Configure SMB Direct over IP networks (RoCEv2) on Windows 2012 Server”