a thread in the RMS forum talked about a tool to help troubleshoot videocard-related audio problems, and it led me to this page.
This guy's product, DoubleDawg, shows you the PCI-bus latency of all the devices in your system, and lets you edit the values - normally windows takes control of these (regardless what you set in your mobo's bios)
although my system has always run rock solid, no problems recording, etc., i'm a hardware junkie so I read all this stuff, and tried out this guy's tool
on my machine, all pci-interfaced devices were reporting either 0-latency or 32ms latency....except my GeForce4 card, which was at 256ms latency
now this is wierd as i can run doom3 in widescreen very damn well
it's important to note that this pci bus latency is different from the asio latency we associate with our audio cards. it doesn't mean that there's a 256ms lag from my vidcard when i send it an instruction. Instead, in this case, it basically means how long a device can 'hog' the bus, before another device can be polled
with higher latency, the bus can start to clog with instructions for the high-latency 'hogging' device, and this can effect other devices that utilize some part of the bus for communication....hence stuttering audio when your fancy GUI's fake VU meter needles start wagging around (in some cases anyway, i never had these problems on the current machine)
anyway, long story short time: I changed my vidcard's pci latency from 256 to 64 with the tool, and i was able to cut my asio latency in HALF without sacrificing stability and performance. I'm certain it was this change, as I have done many tests in the past to be certain that i've lowered my asio buffers as much as i can and still have a stable system. i just cut those figures in half
this guy's tool is free, but you have to restart it each time you launch windows, and re-set the latency value.
he's got a version for $10 that sets it automatically for you at bootup time. I didn't even consider buying it, i went for the freebie....and was blown away by the results, so i went for the ten dollar splurge. bargain....best vst 'accessory' ever...go try it out, i think you'll be really happy you found this
not trying to spam the board or be a pimp or anything, i rarely make recommendations on anything, and never start threads pimping, but i've never heard this mentioned before and i'm really really glad i found it. just wanna share the luv yo
Listen to some Monkey-Music
devices on my machine, but none of them being my soundcard.