If the receive direction uses a different GigE NIC that's part of theCould this be an issue with pause frames? At a previous job I remember having issues with a similar configuration using two broadcom sb1250 3 gigE port devices. If I ran bidirectional tests on a single pair of ports connected via cross over, it was slower than when I gave each direction its own pair of ports. The problem turned out to be that pause frame generation and handling was not configured correctly.
same quad-GigE, all is fine:
[bill@chance4 ~]$ nuttcp -f-beta -Itx -w2m 192.168.6.79 & nuttcp -f-beta -Irx -r -w2m 192.168.5.79
tx: 1186.5051 MB / 10.05 sec = 990.2250 Mbps 12 %TX 13 %RX 0 retrans
rx: 1186.7656 MB / 10.05 sec = 990.5204 Mbps 15 %TX 14 %RX 0 retrans