Latency

For those of you that read my last article, you’ll know that I had to turn the power management off on the PCI slots to make my sound card work properly.  Well tonight I’ve been comparing the new WASAPI drivers vs the ASIO drivers on my RME HDSP9632 sound card using SONAR Platinum, and the effective latency results were quite surprising:

WASAPI: 10ms latency
ASIO (256 samples): 5.8ms
ASIO (128 samples): 2.9ms
ASIO (64 samples): 1.5ms
ASIO (32 samples): 0.7ms

0.7ms is pretty quick!  You can see and here everything change instantly when you pull the fader up and down.  The interesting thing is that before the UEFI update, the card couldn’t cope with < 256 samples reliably on my motherboard and now it can – so I presume there must have been some power saving in operation on the old board but enough for it to work properly.