Recommended windows drivers?

[Echoes in the Attic]

I use a couple windows laptops, one a surface pro 6 (4core) and one a legion 5 (8-core). Often I use either without an audio interface, just with built in audio. On both machines Bitwig has had no problem using the built in audio drivers, directx or something. It’s been fine, useable with reasonable low latencies like 256 samples.

I recently got back into Ableton Live again (former user), but used to use it on Mac (which of course has pretty good built-in audio) but found that using the built-in windows drivers it defaults to some absurd sample delay like 8000 samples or something, and trying to reduce this made crackles with barely any cpu consumption. I remembered the Asio4all driver and downloaded it, which although isn’t an improvement for Bitwig, it did seem to help with Ableton, defaulting to 512 samples (actually it seems to be locked there) with crackle free playback, at least at low cpu testing. Haven’t test higher strain yet.

So I’m curious if there are better options out there for windows audio drivers, especially that Ableton live might like, as it seems different hosts react differently to different drivers!

[Pictus]

Some tweaks that may help
https://gearspace.com/board/showpost.ph ... tcount=295

[yul]

Audio driver will suggest whatever can be made available imo.

Other drivers may not related to your DAW might slow down your machine overall.

I recommend you checked other drivers latency by using this :

https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

You may have a printer or network driver etc that is slowing everything down.

Once you can pinpoint it you can disable it in device manager ou service console.