Ubuntu Desires Lower Audio Latency For Gaming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Desires Lower Audio Latency For Gaming

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen today, developers discussed audio latency for gaming on the premise that "audio latency is relatively high on Linux and we need to be competitive with other platforms."..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIxOTg

[Hamish Wilson]

This is similar to their desire to have better Linux OpenGL drivers but not with any real commitment for major changes upstream but are looking to more or less offload the work to the community.

Again, people like to pick on Lennart Poettering but at least he actively tries to DO SOMETHING to fix up the Linux desktop, rather than just yakking over and over.

[ssvb]

Would it be possible to just bypass pulseaudio and talk directly to ALSA when playing games?

[Shnatsel]

As far as I understand there are virtually no latency-centric test profiles for PTS at the moment.
I tried to write profiles for latency-focused benchmarks like D-bus-pingpong or latt, but I the bits of documentation I've managed to google and dig up on phoronix-test-suite.com were insufficient. Is there a reference or tutorial or something on writing test profiles?

[a user]

Would it be possible to just bypass pulseaudio and talk directly to ALSA when playing games?

of course! that's what quite a lot of programs/games are doing. actually it is a quite easy task.

[RealNC]

Would it be possible to just bypass pulseaudio and talk directly to ALSA when playing games?

That results in the game taking exclusive control of the card. Nothing else will be audible. Which is a disaster. Unless you talk to the dmix device. In that case, you're back to high latency.

[ssvb]

of course! that's what quite a lot of programs/games are doing. actually it is a quite easy task.

Just in case, you do not mean that they are currently going through the virtual ALSA device emulated by pulseaudio?

[Hamish Wilson]

Just in case, you do not mean that they are currently going through the virtual ALSA device emulated by pulseaudio?

That is the impression I got when playing those games, that they were going through the ALSA device.

That results in the game taking exclusive control of the card. Nothing else will be audible. Which is a disaster. Unless you talk to the dmix device. In that case, you're back to high latency.

*ding* *ding* *ding*

[triune]

What's wrong with jack? It's very similar to pulseaudio except that its as close as you can possibly get to raw ALSA latency for as many applications as you can throw at it!

[christian_frank]

That results in the game taking exclusive control of the card. Nothing else will be audible. Which is a disaster. Unless you talk to the dmix device. In that case, you're back to high latency.

to be more specific , this is only the fact for non hw mixing cards ...which sadly seem to be very popular nowadays ..i love my hw mixing soundblaster