Hello,

in 2008 Microsoft came up with MMCSS as a means to protect the audio thread from dropouts caused by other high CPU loads. At that time there had been a lot of testing, you can read all about it in the old threads of this forum (search MMCSS), like

http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3131

For some time we had an option on the Settings dialog About page which allowed to turn this feature on and off. Later then we followed Sonar's advice that the driver should not mess around with MMCSS, but only the DAW should do so. The button was removed with MMCSS disabled (still 2008). That made the driver fully compatible again to all existing DAWs. The topic MMCSS never came up again.

Flash beam forward to the just released ASIO 2.3 (2013...), where Steinberg now states that the driver should set the MMCSS priority, and that this is the only correct way to do it.

Therefore we will add the old switch from 2008 back into all current drivers. Here the first ones for the HDSP/HDSPe series and the HDSPe MADI FX card:

https://archiv.rme-audio.de/download/hdsp_wdm_336.zip

https://archiv.rme-audio.de/download/hd … in_110.zip

Note that at this time activating this option seems to be useful mostly (maybe only) with the latest Cubase/Nuendo, and you will notice differences only at higher CPU loads. According to our tests with other software this option can decrease performance (no change since 2008). The change becomes active after an ASIO reset. Therefore it is easy to quickly check which setting works better on your machine with your specific software.

Happy testing!