Something that is related to the Windows Audio Quality discussion...
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/w...ge-signaled-based-interrupts-msi-tool.378044/
There are three modes in which PCI-E devices may communicate with the rest of the system.
a) Line-Based Interrupts
b) Message Based Interrupts (MSI for short)
c) MSI-X
Then there are two types of interrupts, high priority ISR calls and low priority DPC calls.
The question was "Can Message Based Interrupts improve your sound latency?"
Usually, audio devices are using older type of Line-Based Interrupts and are allowed to perform ISR calls.
This can be checked in a simple way in Device Manager where 'High Definition Audio Controller' does not have assigned a negative number as an IRQ and by LatencyMon tool:
https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
Which will report ISR calls for either mouse, keyboard or HDAud.sys.
This can be changed by registry editing, or by tools in first link I provided. I did test it and here are the results when i enabled Message-Based Interrupts.
a) HDAud.sys no longer uses ISR calls.
b) Average time used by HDAudSys decreased from 13 microseconds to just 3-6 microseconds.
c) Certain applications which play audio may introduce short periods, where sound was looped.
d) Wasapi Exclusive mode does seem to work but .
Conclusion:
Line-Based interrupts for your audio driver maybe are considered to be legacy, and take higher amount of calls and CPU time, but they apparently have higher priority and prevent jitter.