Some newer NICs (some of Intel's for instance) support several packet queues to make it possible to deal with just this problem.
I think it may be more than just "some" newer/newish 10Gig NICs actually. Besides Intel, ChelsIO and Neterion and Broadcom come to mind, and probably Myricom and SolarFlare (did they merge with someone?) and certainly others. I think that Cisco and Qlogic also offer 10G NICs these days.
It would be great if you'd let the list know of the results should you try to use one of the multiqueue NICs for a netfilter firewall, I for one am very curious...
IIRC there are sort of "two" multiqueues - there is the older, more established "inbound" multiqueue stuff - what Microsoft has everyone calling RSS or Recieve Side Scaling (or am I mixing terms?) that only affects inbound packets.
Then there is "tx (transmit) multiqueue" which is rather newer (first in 2.6.26 kernels?) and still "evolving."
If you are forwarding traffic, you probably want both, and likely as not probably want to be on as current (bleeding edge) a kernel and NIC drivers as you can stomache.
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