Does MMCSS benefit all audio operations (e.g., if people are using ASIO drivers), or just WaveRT?
Noel: The MMCSS subsystem itself is independent of WaveRT. MMCSS is the Multimedia Class Scheduler service and affects the prioritization of application threads that are registered with MMCSS. It is up to the application to register its time critical processing threads with MMCSS. You will see MMCSS benefits using ASIO, WDM and WaveRT capable drivers in SONAR. The combination of MMCSS and WaveRT will provide the maximum benefit. Peter: Offloading drawing functions to the GPU of course makes sense in theory, but have you seen noticeable real-world benefits? Noel: Regarding graphics-intensive audio plugins, many plug-ins make use of transparency today. This is most commonly done using the “alpha blending” GDI operation which can be GPU-assisted. Additionally, the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) in Vista makes heavy use of the GPU, so there are more graphics operations that use the GPU than before. Also, the Vista operating system itself is more graphics hungry than XP, so the GPU
